tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-89509742284982640982024-02-08T12:23:12.422-08:00Some books, reviewedEve Properhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04026926577142821030noreply@blogger.comBlogger20125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8950974228498264098.post-55736230371677877602014-04-13T18:15:00.000-07:002014-04-13T18:15:18.397-07:00Smoketown<i>Smoketown</i>
by Tenea D. Johnson
<i>Smoketown</i> is an unusual book in several ways. It takes place in the not-too-far-distant future and is neither a dystopia nor a story of life of Earth rudely interrupted by some external force. It's a story of one town, not of the entire world. Also, it takes place in Kentucky - a gleaming metropolis of Kentucky; the region isn't deployed for either laughs at the expense of hillbillies or as some primitive bastion of folk wisdom.
The novel features several interlocking stories of people who live in a town where birds are banned, owing to a deadly disease that killed many residents decades earlier. Some people have better lives than others, but it's not a dystopia. Like in the real world, some of their obstacles are of their own making, some are random twists of fate, and others are injustices built into the system. Our three point-of-view characters all have things they want to achieve, seemingly unrelated at first.
The world-building here is quite impressive; the city was vivid and real to me as I read. The characters were as well, but lately I've been thinking about setting and world-building - and have been disappointed by a few books.
I am sure the press that published <i>Smoketown</i> is a fine independent press, but this is a novel that deserved to be picked up and widely distributed by a major publisher. You should read it. It's not a long book, so if it doesn't move you, well, it's not like you just waded through the extant volumes of <i>Game of Thrones</i> or the entire run of <i>BSG</i>. But I think you should.Eve Properhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04026926577142821030noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8950974228498264098.post-68892573851532334862014-03-30T18:58:00.000-07:002014-03-30T18:58:39.851-07:00Sister Mine<i>Sister Mine </i><br />by Nalo Hopkinson<br /><br />Just to get this out of the way: I suspect more of you have read Neil Gaiman's <i>Anansi Boys</i> than Nalo Hopkinson's <i>Sister Mine</i> (if nothing else because his book came out some years ago), and if you have you will note similarities right away: Twins demigods have to help out their dad, who is in trouble. Of course, stories about the half-kids of gods are nothing new; China Mieville's <i>King Rat</i> belongs to the genre, as does the Percy Jackson series. The thing is: This book is much better than Gaiman's. <i>Anansi Boys</i> isn't his strongest effort, and <i>Sister Mine </i>is more interesting and has better world-building.<br /><br />The book has several twists, as our (mundane) heroine and her sister fight and reunite as they try to find their father and restore his spirit. This quest involves their extended divine family, some human caretakers, and some plain old humans, many of whom have their own angles on how best to help dad out. Not all those angles intersect with what our the twins want, or what is best for them.<br />
<br />
The characters feel fully fleshed out, and the settings are vivid. The book has a great sense of place (and I haven't been to Toronto since I was 9). Moreover, the book had a high barrier to overcome with me; I have an irrational dislike of stories about rock musicians, and this novel cleared that hurdle easily. It's also a fast-moving book, raising questions and answering them only to ask more on the next page.Eve Properhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04026926577142821030noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8950974228498264098.post-55109330824318173962014-03-23T19:33:00.000-07:002014-03-23T19:33:03.447-07:00Angle of Repose<i>Angle of Repose</i><br />
by Wallace Stegner<br />
<br />
This is, I suppose, not Wallace Stegner's fault, but if the book had been written by a woman, it wouldn't be considered a "literary" novel. Eve Properhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04026926577142821030noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8950974228498264098.post-43986638059177023432014-03-09T20:23:00.003-07:002014-03-09T20:24:09.416-07:00Three Squares<i>Three Squares: The Invention of the American Meal </i><br />
by Abigail Carroll<br />
<br />
At some point in my adult life, I learned that not every culture had a concept of breakfast in the American sense. Lots of cultures had morning meals, but the idea of special foods for that meal was more unusual than not. I felt rather sorry for these societies - realizing full well that was a spectacular act of ethnocentrism on my part.<br />
<br />
I turned to <i>Three Squares</i> to find some answers on why American dining is different. It's not a comparative work, although the American meal system is contrasted with the British and Native American styles in the colonial era and the French in the Victorian era. (One key point: Not only is having three meals a day not universal, the concept of a "meal" isn't even universal.) Rather, it's a historical effort, tracing the changes in American eating from colonial times to now.<br />
<br />
The big takeaway for me was how differently Americans ate even 150 years ago. We tend to take our meal structure for granted, and even people who should be more creative with it, such as science fiction and fantasy writers for the page and screen, tend not to do anything more creative than promote teatime into a fourth meal.<br />
<br />
The book is also full of some fun trivia. "Snack" and "lunch" used to mean the same thing - a snack. The "wonder" in Wonder Bread is that it is sliced. And one of the Kellogg brothers was excommunicated by the Seventh Day Adventist church for adding sugar to Corn Flakes.<br />
<br />
Carroll has a PhD in American Studies, and it shows in the writing. The concepts and vocabulary aren't particularly academic and should be accessible to most readers, but the structure of each chapter has more in common with academic prose than creative nonfiction. Readers who don't read a lot of academic prose likely won't notice, though.<br />
<br />
I would have liked to see more international comparisons, particularly as the book moved forward in time (are Canadian mealtimes in any way different? What about those Brits?). That said, that is my request, not the book she was trying to write, and to include that would have made it a much larger book.<br />
<br />
The downside of this book? I've been wanting to eat nothing but breakfast for the last week.Eve Properhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04026926577142821030noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8950974228498264098.post-91750394334184537632014-03-02T20:17:00.001-08:002014-03-02T20:17:58.907-08:00The Steel Spring<i>The Steel Spring</i><br />by Per Wahlöö<br /><br />I picked up this book on the sale table at Book Culture. My knowledge of Scandinavian crime lit consists solely of (1) I read <i>The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo</i> and (2) It's a big thing, apparently. Needless to say, I hadn't heard of Wahlöö (a double-umlaut author!), who may have invented the genre in concert with his collaboration on the Inspector Martin series, Maj Sjöwall. <i>The Steel Spring</i> is not part of that series; it's actually speculative fiction, set in the near future - at least from the perspective of 1960 - although it is a police procedural. The puzzle is much larger than one dead body, though.<br /><br />The book handles the speculative element well, unlike many genre books written by authors outside of it. Another book I read recently also featured a dystopian future, one that in many ways was poorly thought out, and I got the sense that the author thought that didn't really matter, because the dystopia was all-too-obviously only a metaphor for today, so why bother? Wahlöö is also extrapolating from his time and political sentiments, but he made the effort to get the details right. <br /><br />This book reminded me at times of Thomas Disch's <i>334</i> (which might just be the similar covers on the editions I own, and, geez, doesn't that make me sound like a ditz), as well as every mystery since that ever featured a hard-boiled police officer. Wahlöö uses a very interesting point of view: The book is in limited third. It's almost camera eye, as Inspector Jensen seems to have very little interiority, but strictly speaking it's not; details are revealed, such as the pain in his side before surgery or his thoughts about an ambulance crew, that put it into limited third. I had a sense that Jensen has ruthlessly suppressed his thoughts and opinions, not that we just can't see them.<br /><br />I now wish I had picked up Wahlöö's "Murder on the Thirty-First Floor" while I was at the sale table; it is his other novel featuring Inspector Jensen. <i>The Steel Spring </i>is a fast read, but I suspect I'll spend some time picking apart some of the author's craft.Eve Properhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04026926577142821030noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8950974228498264098.post-32009868215623636082014-02-23T21:07:00.001-08:002014-02-23T21:07:07.624-08:00Mothership<i>Mothership: Tales from Afrofuturism and Beyond</i><br />
Edited by Bill Campbell and Edward Austin Hall<br />
<br />
This
is a book I was interested in reading after I heard about the editors'
Indiegogo campaign (which, full disclosure, I did not contribute to).
It's is a speculative fiction anthology, and, as is typical, the stories
within aren't even in quality. A few are poor; a few a bland; many are
good; and a few are excellent. But a range of quality (or, perhaps, the
range is in the reader's taste?) is par for the course in an anthology.
In any case, a few weak stories don't mar the reading experience the way
a few weak sections would hurt a novel. So, yes, it's an anthology, and
if you like reading short speculative fiction, it's probably your cup
of tea.<br />
<br />
The biggest issue with this book is labeling:
It's not what it says on the tin. The title suggests science fiction -
Afro-centric science fiction - but the contents are speculative fiction,
including fantasy, from a range of cultures. Which, of course, is a
totally valid theme for an anthology, but it's not what most readers are
going to expect given the title and the cover art. (The stories include
those with African, Asian, Caribbean, Latino/a, and Native American
themes, as well as a couple of Euro-centric and white-American stories.
Of course white American culture is part of multiculturalism, just like
WASPs have ethnicity and white is a race, but in an anthology designed
to showcase diversity that usually isn't privileged in the genre, I
found their inclusion an interesting choice.) The stories range from
those that are decidedly future to those set in the present and even
several set in the past. In other words, it's not all Afro, nor all
future.<br />
<br />
So, that's a bigger weakness than uneven story
quality - because it's a marketing error, and part of the point of the
anthology is to get some of this stuff out to a larger audience. <br />
<br />
Alright, titles matter. But aside from that?<br />
<br />
What
I'm taking away from the book is a couple of authors I was unfamiliar
with. It didn't come as any surprise to me that N.K. Jemisin or Junot
Diaz, for example, could write a good story, although it's always
pleasurable to encounter new pieces by writers you generally enjoy.
However, there were some writers whose names I was previously unfamiliar
with who I am now on the lookout for - Chinelo Onwualu, Vandana Singh,
S.P. Somtow, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, Joseph Bruchac, Daniel Jose Older,
Tade Thompson, Tenea D. Johnson - I am ashamed to say I had heard of
none of them. What this means is the anthology has done its job. I can
quibble about the title all I like, but at the end of the day I think
you should read it, and also I have to go make my Amazon wishlist
longer.Eve Properhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04026926577142821030noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8950974228498264098.post-2363184352369656102014-02-09T06:42:00.003-08:002014-02-09T06:44:05.129-08:00Annihilation<i>Annihilation</i><br />
by Jeff VanderMeer<br />
<br />
There are only a few writers currently publishing whose books I buy as soon as they come out. Of those, Jeff VanderMeer undoubtedly does the best job of building up anticipation among his readers, thanks to his generous use of social media. (It's a good thing for Thomas Pynchon he is famous - otherwise no one except his wife and his editor would notice when his books dropped.) VanderMeer has been talking about his Southern Reach trilogy on Facebook, etc. for what seems like decades now, although of course reader years are like dog years, and now the first volume, <i>Annihilation</i>, is finally available.<br />
<br />
VanderMeer is a writer of speculative fiction - certainly on the fantasy rather than the science fiction end of things - but this book edges farther into horror territory. It's the story of an expedition into Area X, an area that has been sealed off from the general public for an unknown period of years. This expedition, consisting of four women, is to go in, explore, and record what they find. What they find is a seemingly flourishing natural area with a few disturbing oddities.<br />
<br />
By the end of the novel, we only know a very little more about Area X than we did at the beginning. This would prove deeply unsatisfying in most novels, making me suspicious the writer couldn't actually decide what was going on. It would work in a short story, and it works here, where we know there are two more volumes to come. <br />
<br />
The story is told by one of the expedition members, a biologist whose innate reluctance to share personal details fits well with the mission's spare ethos. Team members, for example, know each other by title rather than name, and their lives prior to joining the expedition are not discussed.* We come to know more about the biologist over the course of the book. We also know more about Area X, but it becomes evident just how little that is.<br />
<br />
Luckily for impatient readers, all three books are already completed; the second volume, <i>Authority</i>, comes out in May. Oh, and if you don't usually buy books right away because of the price of hardcover books, the trilogy is in paperback from the get-go.<br />
<br />
<br />
* VanderMeer has said in a couple of interviews that there is no physical description of the characters in the book. Strictly speaking, this is not entirely true; the lighthouse keeper (who may or may not be a character) is described only in the briefest of ways when the narrator sees his photo, and one member of the exploration team has her hair pulled back, which tells us (a) she has hair and (b) that it is long enough to be pulled back. That these two exceptions stand out so strongly, though, only reinforces the general truth of his statement.<br />
<br />
But this leads me to wonder in a more general way about what constitutes physical description. We know the characters are human women, which tells us they don't look like panda bears or magpies. Our narrator walks, which means she isn't in a wheelchair, and she does things with her arms, so she isn't missing any limbs. She wears clothes. That's not a lot to go on; she could be black or white, tall or short, elegant or awkward. But we know we aren't reading about a be-tentacled being at the Alpha Centauri Naturist Resort.<br />
<br />
One way to describe a character is to be very obvious about it: "Bea looked in the mirror and saw a 5-foot-four slender brunette with a 34C chest and shapely buttocks." Better writers drop clues along the way - "Bea asked Biff to get the sugar down from the top shelf" tells us that Bea is on the short side. But to do the reverse, to tell us nothing about the characters at all, is nearly an impossible task. If you have them move about a room, what verb can you used other than "walked" (unless the character is a slithering slug, or in a wheelchair, or pure energy)? You can get cagey and use "moved," but the reader sees that as an obfuscation, as a withholding of information. <br />
<br />
Which is all to say, "no physical description" is an asymptote a writer can approach but never quite reach. Eve Properhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04026926577142821030noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8950974228498264098.post-89401814330267710682014-02-02T09:38:00.000-08:002014-02-02T09:38:00.209-08:00Re-read review<i>Emily's Quest</i><br />by L.M. Montgomery<br /><br />L.M. Montgomery's most famous character is Anne Shirley of Green Gables, but to me Anne was a far-distant second to Emily Starr, protagonist of a three-book series. Emily, like Anne, is an orphan living on Prince Edward Island, and both are intelligent and possess a strong sense of self, but their personalities and lives are quite different.<br /><br />Unlike Anne, Emily lives with her father until the age of 8, when he passes away - her mother having died many years earlier. Upon her father's death, Emily moves in with her mother's family, strangers to her. The first book, <i>Emily of New Moon</i>, is her struggle to come to terms with her father's death and make a place for herself in a household that isn't entirely welcoming. The second book, <i>Emily Climbs</i>, tells of her years away at high school, although to modern readers it feels more like a college story. The final book, <i>Emily's Quest</i>, describes her attempt to build a writing career and find love.<br /><br />It's her passion for writing that sets Emily apart from Anne, who, for all her intelligence and good cheer, doesn't actually have ambitions. (It always amuses me when screen adaptations try to make Anne a writer; aside from starting a youthful writing club, Anne has no ambitions to be or success at that endeavor.) Emily's friends - a much more closed circle than Anne's - are equally ambitious, and what's more, all end up succeeding at their chosen careers. Throughout all three of the books, no matter what else Emily deals with, her authorial ambitions are always present - with one important exception, as we'll see below. <br /><br />As the book opens, Emily has moved back to New Moon after high school, having turned down a job offer with a big-city magazine. In modern U.S. terms, she's chosen to move back to the family farm in Montana instead of taking that entry-level job at<i> The New Yorker.</i> She settles down to write, while her best friends go to the big city chasing their dreams. She has several brief relationships of no significance; the reader knows her heart belongs to her friend Teddy, and we think he returns the sentiment, although both of them refuse to make the first move. Meanwhile, she begins to find commercial success as a writer.<br /><br />As the "romance novel" of the trilogy, <i>Emily's Quest </i>could have been the book that undercut the message of the previous two books, a message that argues quite subtly for female independence. Certainly, this is the message many of its peer novels sent, such as <i>Emily of Deep Valley</i> (no relation) or <i>A Girl of the Limberlost</i>. Getting with the man of their dreams meant, for those heroines, giving up their own dreams and adopting their sweethearts'. <br /><br />Emily tries this tactic. A manipulative older male friend undercuts her writing ambitions, and Emily hurts herself in an accident. She gives up writing and turns to him for comfort, going so far as to get engaged and furnish a house. While she breaks the engagement because she realizes she doesn't love him but her friend Teddy, the novel doesn't take the expected turn and get her and Teddy together. Instead, Emily rebuilds her life as a single person. She takes up writing again. She also suffers a great deal of loneliness - hardly surprising, for a woman of almost 30 living in a house of elderly relatives, with few people nearby she has much in common with. But the loneliness is bearable compared to the extinction of self she underwent during her engagement.<br /><br />Nevertheless, it becomes even harder to bear when Teddy and her other best friend, Ilse, get engaged.<br /><br />When I was a child, I thought this book was the most trifling of the trilogy, because it was just about boyfriends. When I was a little older, I realized how sad it was. There was a time, around my 30th birthday, beset by minor health issues and as single as it is possible to be, when I couldn't even re-read it. Only recently have I realized how progressive its message is, and how out-of-step with its time. First, the books tells us, you have to be yourself, who you are meant to be, and "you" includes women. Only after you achieve that can other people add to your happiness. It even makes a good argument for ladies making the first move, as that's how Ilse eventually gets what she wants - and Emily, in hindsight, could have saved herself a great deal of grief this way.<br /><br />There were a lot of books I obsessively re-read as a kid, but this was the only character I really saw myself in - I sympathized with with many characters, but I identified with very few of them. This trilogy played a big part in developing my sense of what a female writer could be like. (It also made me extremely annoyed when everyone started naming their daughters "Emily" a few years ago, because, dammit, I wanted to use that name.) It goes into some surprisingly dark corners for a children's novel of its era, and is remarkably progressive for a novel about a woman's decision about who to marry. Even now, I'm not sure if the "quest" is to find a life partner, or to succeed as a writer, or to become a fulfilled human being.Eve Properhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04026926577142821030noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8950974228498264098.post-47611193004198856912014-01-20T12:10:00.003-08:002014-01-31T09:38:56.922-08:00Up Against It<i>Up Against It</i><br />
by M.J. Locke<br />
<br />
I don't read a lot of hard sci-fi, although I can't pinpoint why it doesn't appeal to me as much as other subgenres. Sometimes it feels like reading a technical manual, and sometimes characters are heroically cardboard - but similar complaints could be lobbed against any other kind of writing. <i>Up Against It</i> won plaudits when it came out, including for having a strong female protagonist, so I gave it a shot.<br />
<br />
<i>Up Against It</i> flirts with being a YA novel. The story head-hops between several characters, most notably Jane, our protagonist, and Geoff, who is also a protagonist. He's in his late teens and a recent high school grad, and much of the plot involves him and his three buddies riding space bikes. Geoff's age plus the PG-13 rating of the plot (there's nothing graphic sexually, for example) means it could well fit into the YA slot, although the book was not marketed as such. <br />
<br />
Like most hard sci-fi, the focus isn't on social systems, and differences between today's society and the future's are dropped as one-liners in passing. Life on the far asteroids is more egalitarian than our world (or the Earth of the book's future), although none of the social innovations in the book are particularly novel. Plot-wise, it's typical hard stuff - the world is in danger and must be saved. <br />
<br />
Overall, <i>Up Against It </i>is a satisfying read. Not every book needs to turn your head upside-down and inside-out. And it is nice to see a woman writing in a mode that is dominated by men. Eve Properhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04026926577142821030noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8950974228498264098.post-22611390226793108972014-01-05T13:19:00.000-08:002014-01-05T13:19:20.694-08:00The Female Man<i>The Female Man</i><br />
by Joanna Russ<br />
<br />
<i>The Female Man </i>is supposedly a great, literary science fiction novel, that, therefore, is entirely impossible to find on the shelves of any bookseller. I don't think it helps that the currently available edition has a rather ugly cover and poor typesetting - one would hardly be enticed to pick it up on a whim. <br /><br />It is a literary novel in the sense that it demands a fair amount of work from the reader. Viewpoints and rhetorical styles change frequently - multiple times on a single page in some cases. We see one character in limited third, than described by another character, then by another, requiring the reader to actively sense-make. <br /><br />It may also be literary in the sense that the plot, when described, is deceptively simple: Four genetically identical women from parallel universes are brought together - one from a mid-century New York where the Great Depression never ended, one from more or less "real" 1970s New York, one from a future utopia where there are no men, and one from a future where men and women are in a perpetual, and non-metaphorical, war of the sexes. That's it. While you might expect this sort of thing would shake up the characters' world-views, they hold on to their assumptions and mores - only one of the four ends up seeing any of the worlds as a viable alternative to their own. That's not to say the book plods along - the action is created in the narration and the work reader and author do together. In a sense, the structure is the plot.<br /><br />I don't mean to suggest <i>The Female Man</i> is literature "instead of" science fiction - Russ draws on SF tropes as well as the utopian tradition. Like Gilman's <i>Herland</i> or Piercy's Massapoiset in <i>Woman on the Edge of Time</i>, the proposed utopia is agrarian and genderless (in the case of <i>Herland</i> and <i>The Female Man</i>, because there are no men; in <i>Woman on the Edge of Time</i>, it's because gender doesn't matter). Technology is present but in the service of the ecosystem rather than the converse; society is non-hierarchical and communal. The agrarian-feminist vision of utopia has since been justifiably critiqued by Donna Haraway and others, and the notion of peaceful, egalitarian women is an interesting type of gender essentialism. (Of course, I'd still rather live there than any of the other worlds described.) But then, the book is a product of the 1970s and in dialog with that decade's ideas. <br /><br />Some books that are so overtly politically, philosophically, sociologically engaged with the ideas of their moment subsequently become irrelevant if not incomprehensible. <i>The Female Man</i> has not, in part because we still live in a sexist world. When I try to pin down what, precisely, has changed, only one thing stood out - people are less likely to say that one advantage of being female is that one "gets to wear pretty dresses." Femininity, even when regarded as "natural," has become more recognized as also being work. But, as one character tells us:<br /><i>My doctor is male.<br />My lawyer is male.<br />My tax-accountant is male.<br />The grocery-store owner (on the corner) is male.<br />The janitor in my apartment building is male.<br />The president of my bank is male. …<br />The Army is male.<br />The Navy is male.<br />The government is (mostly) male.<br />I think most of the people in the world are male. </i>Eve Properhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04026926577142821030noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8950974228498264098.post-20680651528235311502013-12-29T20:54:00.000-08:002013-12-29T20:54:04.134-08:00Best of 2013These books are the ones that I'm prepared to call the best of 2013 - that is, that <i>I </i>read in 2013. I offer you no guarantee they were published in 2013, mind.<br />
<i> </i><br />
<i>White Teeth</i> by Zadie Smith: Unlike the other books I've picked, this one isn't remotely new, but this sprawling coming-of-age story reminds me of Edgardo Yunque, whose <i>Lamentable Journey</i> was written around the same time. Alas, Yunque is no longer with us, but thankfully Smith is.<br />
<br />
<i>1Q84</i> by Haruki Murakami: This book, popular enough that you don't need me to introduce it, is fantasy verging on magical realism, quite long, and surprisingly small-scale in its resolution.<br />
<br />
<i>2312</i> by Kim Stanley Robinson: Most of the time I was reading this, I didn't actually enjoy it. What impressed me at the time - and the reason I don't forget it - is the wide range of human habitats Robinson describes. Any one on its own would be lauded as inventive; taken together, its a startling vision.<br />
<br />
<i>Cloud Atlas</i> by David Mitchell: The best book I read all year? Likely not. Perhaps it's on here because I was singularly unimpressed with the movie and expected so little of the novel it was based on. The ultimate vision of the novel and the movie are as different as the visions of <i>Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?</i> and <i>Blade Runner</i>, and the Russian nesting-doll structure of the book is a far more carefully crafted piece of work than the haphazard chronology of the movie.<br />
<br />
<i>Dream of Ding Village</i> by Yan Lianke: A book I likely would have never heard of if I hadn't been faced with a limited English-language selection at the bookstore at Iguatemi Florianopolis, this book tells the story of a Chinese village devastated by the AIDS crisis - with the government's complicity. That the story is told by a ghost makes for a interesting narrative structure without making the novel a part of the fantasy genre. Eve Properhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04026926577142821030noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8950974228498264098.post-32293581410224590022013-12-22T11:30:00.000-08:002013-12-22T11:30:00.681-08:00Starboard Wine<i>Starboard Wine: More Notes on the Language of Science Fiction</i><br />by Samuel R. Delany<br /><br />It was with high expectations that I went to see the American Museum of Natural History's newest planetarium show on dark matter, because - well, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, mostly. But I came away disappointed. About 4/5 of the show was spent presenting background information necessary to understanding the concept of dark matter, rather than exploring what it might be. Wouldn't planetarium audiences already know that stuff? After all, I had first heard of dark matter at a presentation by a friend studying astronomy back in college, and I was no scientist.<br /><br />But another friend, also an astronomer, recently reported after a planetarium talk she gave that adult audience members were unaware of the fact that galaxies give off their own light, rather than reflecting the light of our sun!<br /><br />This sheer lack of of basic scientific knowledge is one reason Delany posits to explain why some readers, even avid ones, don't enjoy science fiction. He discusses at great length how a reader might parse the sentence fragment "monopole magnet mining operations in the outer asteroid belt of Delta Cygni," especially a reader less fond of science.<br /><br />Yet SF readers often "read around" what they don't know - to whit, it never occurred to me that "Delta" Cygni would represent the <i>fourth</i> star in a system, although my experience with the naming conventions of fraternity and sorority chapters should have led to ready extrapolation. <br /><br />But reading SF requires more than an acquaintance with science; it requires, in Delany's phrase, a different set of reading protocols than realistic fiction. The reader must engage in world-building along with the author, learning from scant clues how objects and society behave. Even SF readers can lose this facility and enjoy only L. Ron Hubbard, paranormal urban fantasy, or Star Trek novelizations - to choose a few examples from folks I am personally acquainted with.<br /><br /><i>Starboard Wine</i> is, ultimately, about how one reads SF, and how it is a genre defined by these reading protocols rather than by a setting, as Westerns are, or a plot structure, as romance novels and mysteries are. (Of course, being a collection of essays, the book is about many different things. One of these things is an evaluation of the work of several writers. I am less qualified to comment on these, having read (for example) no Sturgeon and precisely as much Heinlein as I want to.) It follows his earlier collection, <i>The Jewel-Hinged Jaw,</i> which I found myself wishing I had with me: Delany spends much time here discussing how SF and mundane fiction compare, and I wanted to refresh my memory on how he fits fantasy as a genre into this schema. <br /><br />The essays are nearly as old as I am, and the recently revised edition is thoughtfully updated with footnotes as well as an introduction by another author, although I found the former of much more interest than the latter. This chronology is startling only insofar as one realizes that Delany's three-decade-old thoughts on SF are still far ahead of how a good number of fans conceptualize the genre today. I would like to read his most recent collection, <i>About Writing</i>, although its focus is less SFnal. It would be nice to see an up-to-date collection of his latest thoughts on the genre, which at present are scattered.Eve Properhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04026926577142821030noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8950974228498264098.post-41953112289778608632013-12-08T16:42:00.003-08:002013-12-08T16:42:38.825-08:00Grass<i>Grass</i><br />
Sheri S. Tepper<br />
<br />
Today I wandered the science fiction aisles of Barnes & Noble and came away empty-handed. This happens often enough that I sometimes wonder if I really like the genre. To be sure, B&N had some books that I like but have already read, and they had an interesting sequel on the New Books shelf - although not the first book, and I'm rather strict about order. Yet, overall, my impression was that speculative fiction is apparently all urban fantasy (in the vampires-and-werewolves sense) or daring space expeditions (in the warmed-over Star Trek sense). <br />
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Therefore, it's always reassuring to find an author that I do like, especially when it's an author with a substantial backlist. On one hand, I wonder why I didn't know about them sooner, but on the other, I'm just glad to find more to read. The latest instance of this is <i>Grass</i> by Sheri S. Tepper, another book that ended up on my Amazon wishlist without any recollection on my part of how it got there.<br />
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Tepper is a feminist and environmentalist and an autodidact whose writing bats far above her education level. If I were an English professor or con organizer, I'd prepare some thoughtful analysis of the ideology of Grass as compared to Nicola Griffith's <i>Ammonite</i> and Mary Doria Russell's <i>The Sparrow</i> (perhaps contrasted with Orson Scott Card's <i>Speaker for the Dead</i>?), but I'm not, and you can't make me. <br />
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<i>Grass</i> is the story of a world with humans and other sentient lifeforms that the humans don't understand too well. A virus that threatens humanity all across the universe serves as a MacGuffin for the exploration of morality and responsibility.<br />
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There are a few miscues - Tepper seems to have a hard time sympathetically portraying characters in opposition to the "right" side, which is problematic when writing in head-hopping third person. The protagonist's husband and daughter, in particular, come off with all the believability of cardboard. And there is what I swear is a reference to an Elton John song at one point. It wouldn't jar so if it weren't the only 20th-century wink in the entire book. <br />
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Still, <i>Grass</i> is engrossing, and even when you can see where it is headed, it journey remains an interesting one. I'm curious to read the next book in the trilogy, as it takes place on another world, with other characters. Eve Properhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04026926577142821030noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8950974228498264098.post-5168154679355626512013-12-01T19:56:00.001-08:002013-12-01T19:56:09.874-08:00The Between<i>The Between</i><br />Tananarive Due<br /><br />Say what one will about Amazon - and I have plenty to say - one area in which it excels is in delivering out-of-print, hard-to-find books. Sometimes these books are available elsewhere electronically, but if you want paper in your hands, Amazon will usually succeed where even Powell's fails. Whether the books deserve to be out-of-print and hard-to-find is an entirely different matter.<br />
<br />
<i>The Between </i>was championed somewhere, at some point, by a writer who I trust, if I recall correctly, although not to me specifically. From there it moved to my Amazon wishlist, and eventually to my doorstep. It's a novel that could better be described as speculative fiction verging on horror than as fantasy, insofar as fantasy conjures up elves and quests. Instead, it is almost a realistic novel, set in our everyday world, with a little bit of spirit haunting.<br /><br />The book reminded me strongly of Neil Gaiman, which isn't to suggest that Due is derivative; <i>The Between </i> was published in 1995, about when Gaiman's first solo novel was being written. But you could take Due's novel and repackage it with Gaiman's name and have a best-seller on your hands. (Of course, Gaiman could publish a book consisting of photos of his bowel movements, and his loyal readers would rush to praise it. That he doesn't is a testament to the fact that, in addition to being a good writer, he appears to be a decent human being.) Instead, it received modest critical acclaim and eventually fell out of print.<br /><br />The SFF community likes to depict itself as egalitarian, enlightened, and not prone to celebrity worship. Not like those mundanes panting for the next installment of the Kardashians or Teen Mom, no sir! But speculative fiction fans are not free of sexism or racism, and they're as likely as everyone else to lionize the writers that already have been idolized by others. Gaiman is a handsome, goth/rock-god-looking white man, in a leather jacket with rumpled hair. And Due is a black woman, full stop. While she's continued to publish, she's never achieved the level of success that would return her backcatalog to print.<br /><br />Yet <i>The Between </i> is a highly readable story, accessible both to genre fans and readers of realistic fiction. It's the story of one man whose world is starting to crack, and it's the story of him struggling to hold his marriage and family together. It's the kind of book a lot of readers would enjoy, if they knew it existed.<br />Eve Properhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04026926577142821030noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8950974228498264098.post-22824566387463105622013-11-24T18:44:00.000-08:002013-12-08T16:43:09.772-08:00Grace Harlowe's college years<i>Grace Harlowe's First Year at Overton College<br />Grace Harlowe's Second Year at Overton College <br />Grace Harlowe's Third Year at Overton College<br />Grace Harlowe's Fourth Year at Overton College</i><br />
Josephine Chase dba Jessie Graham Flower<br />
<br />
The story of Grace Harlowe's college years, as told in a series of four books, follows a series about Grace in high school, and proceeds two further series about her adult life. No longer in print, these pulp books for girls were published a century ago and are rather undistinguished as literature. Author Josephine Chase also wrote the Marjorie Dean series, with equally pedestrian titles and equally tun-of-the-mill plots and characters. This was the era when the genre of the college novel flourished, with iterations ranging from the literarily ambitious to this - novels by formula for a young audience that wanted exactly more of the same. <br />
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It's not a reflection on the era, of course, or even the age of the readers. The Sweet Valley novels that reigned during my childhood years were equally formulaic, while some girls' novels of a century ago featured fully developed characters that grew and changed over time. Not Grace or Marjorie! Then again, the girls wouldn't be able to change, at least not for the better, as they start off their series as the implausibly ideal girl. Grace might have a weak thought every now and again, but she would never act on it, and her friends all look up to her as an example.<br />
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In her book on campus life, Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz describes the difference between the well-off, for whom affording college is not a struggle, and the ambitious poor, who must attend to secure a living - what she calls the college joe versus the greasy grind. Most of this struggle is invisible in the lighter college fare for children. Generally there is one poor friend, yet she somehow rarely struggles to keep up with her gang. But social difference does rear its head briefly in the Grace Harlowe series. Grace discovers a group of poor students living in a cheap, unpleasant boarding hall and forms an organization of students to raise funds for their aid. The aid is delivered anonymously, and most of it is given as loans. While the poor students go without necessities such as gloves, their patrons buy fabric and trimmings to make elaborate costumes for their fund-raisers. "It doesn't seem fair that I should have had such good times when so many girls here have nothing but hard work and worry over money matters," Grace says in her senior year. Not incidentally, these girls are "digs" who study hard and enjoy few of the pleasures of college life.<br />
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Even with additional funds and anonymous gifts of accessories, though, these poor students remain in a separate world. Class and money are addressed nearly directly at one point when Arline, an especially wealthy student, stays on campus for Christmas and serves as the anonymous benefactor of social outings for the poorer girls. On Christmas day they dine at two local restaurants regularly patronized by the wealthier girls - the first time for most of the poor digs. Arline comments to her friends afterward about how difficult it was to socialize with them because of these differences. <br />
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Much is made in college novels of the 19th and early 20th centuries of "doing something" for ones college (as well as one's class year) - in the more serious novels as well. Playing basketball, holding charitable events - these are "doing something." One can only assume the students at Overton who don't have the time or money to do for are thereby taking <i>from</i> the college, but doing nothing <i>for</i> it.<br />
<br />
This brief flash of class consciousness aside, other forms of diversity don't appear. The students are, to a number, Christian, white, and female. (The last of these is to be expected at a woman's college, which Overton is.) The institutions of the era were not diverse, but the erasure of all diversity is still problematic. <br />
<br />
In short, these books create a pretty, pleasant fantasy world, at least for those girls who can imagine themselves to be inside of it. They're amusing and, almost, harmless.Eve Properhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04026926577142821030noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8950974228498264098.post-21573553210711067872013-11-17T10:34:00.001-08:002013-11-17T10:34:41.895-08:00The Collected Stories
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<span style="font-family: Times;">Leonard Michaels</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times;"><i>The Collected Stories</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times;"><i> </i> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times;">I came across Leonard
Michaels in Stanley Fish’s H<i>ow to Read a Sentence (And How to Write One)</i>, where
Fish discusses Michaels’ short story “Honeymoon,” and, exceeding his
self-imposed boundaries, muses on much more than its opening sentence. I wanted
to read “Honeymoon” for myself and ordered up his <i>Collected Stories</i>. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times;">Michaels was a writer of
literary fiction, with all that entailed in the mid- to late-twentieth century,
a New York Jew who became a California professor. The stories as collected are
arranged roughly in chronological order, which means the first half of the book
is mostly tales of Jewish men struggling with shiksa women. Frankly, his
anxieties are not that different from those of a Roth or an Updike, and
therefore somewhat tiresome to a later generation. (Women are not a strange
species who exist only to cause confusion and discomfort in men. If “modern”
swinging love makes you unhappy, give it up and just do what makes you happy.
Etc.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times;">But his writing is at times
splendid and not easy to take. The book’s opening salvo is the story of a
college woman who is raped and then commits suicide. It is at no point graphic,
but it is brutal.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times;">I recently read Paul Haines’
final collection of short stories, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Last Days of Kali Yuga. </i>(This is not a digression.) Haines wrote horror – most
of it not creepy, suggestive horror, but bloodspatter and entrail-waving horror.
His stories are fine; some of them even won awards. None of them hold a candle
to his brilliant novella “Wives,” which closes out the book. “Wives,” strictly
speaking, isn’t horror; it’s speculative fiction, in which the only
“speculative” part is changes in social structure. There is no hint of the
fantastical, mythical, phantasmagorical, eldritch, unearthly, or divine in it,
but simply a graphic critique of patriarchy.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times;">Where Haines’ career would
have gone if he had lived longer is unknowable, but “Wives” suggests he was
finding his true métier with longer fiction. The second-best thing he wrote was
his blog, in which he unflinchingly discussed his cancer and the family he
would soon be leaving behind. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times;">What he would not have
become was Leonard Michaels. Michaels, unlike Haines, lived a long life,
although his career was short – several short-story collections and two novels,
one of which was a success. The novels do not hold up well. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times;">But the short stories – his
short stories are more truly horror than any of Haines’ tales of backpackers
with cruel knives, despite that they are “realistic” literary fiction. Each
brief story is a slim-tipped needle that sinks into your skin easily and leaves
your bleeding. At least, this is the case for the first two-thirds of the
collection.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times;">Somewhere past the halfway
point the horror stops and the stories become rather banal tales of modern men
going to modern parties with their girlfriends, usually of a different
ethnicity or religious persuasion, and modernly taking drugs and having
exhausting, modern, unjoyous sex with partners not of their own choosing.
Things do pick up near the end with his Nachman stories – less sex and drugs,
more math and Asperger’s. Somewhere in here, too, his women turn into human
beings, even if not likeable ones.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times;">Haines also would never have
become Michaels because his stories, for all that they feature white male
protagonists, are highly critical of the patriarchy and sexism that is taken
for granted in Michaels. Haines, nearly literally, puts women in refrigerators,
but he does so to a purpose. Michaels would never do anything so pulpy, but he
seems to sincerely believe that is where women belong. David Bezmozgiz in
<i>Tablet</i> magazine seems somewhat mystified that his friend and mentor isn’t
better known. I could tell him why, but I don’t think he’d understand, any more than Michaels himself did. </span></div>
Eve Properhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04026926577142821030noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8950974228498264098.post-48638184216716922752013-11-11T10:06:00.000-08:002013-11-11T10:06:14.571-08:00Wanderlust<i>Wanderlust: A History of Walking</i><br />
Rebecca Solnit<br />
<br />
I first discovered Rebecca Solnit at the Vanderbilt library when I was looking for something else entirely, picking up <i>Savage Dreams</i> based almost entirely on its title. I knew something about Yosemite, less about protests, and nothing at all about nuclear tests over Nevada, but the book was compelling nevertheless. Like John McPhee, she writes creative nonfiction that leaps from subject to subject, but unlike him, she is present in her books, even though they aren't about her, as a minor, first-person narrator. <br /><br /><i>Wanderlust</i> is about all kinds of walking - that of the flaneur, the rambler, the pilgrim, the landscape consumer, the protestor, the distance walker; in the city and the wilderness; for health, for anonymity, for escape, for fashion, for spiritual growth; about walking alone, walking together, and not walking at all. Compared to<i> Savage Dreams</i>, this is territory I know.<br /><br />McPhee's books tend to be much more focused; Solnit is a bricoleur, astonishingly well-read and wide-ranging, editorializing and making observations that, only after hearing, become obvious. Consider: "Among the terms for prostitutes are streetwalkers, women of the streets, women on the town, and public women (and of course phrases such as public man, man about town, or man of the streets mean very different things than do their equivalents attached to women). … Had a group of women called themselves the Sunday Tramps, as did a group of Leslie Stephen's male friends, the monicker would have implied not that they went walking but that they engaged in something rather salacious on Sundays."<br /><br />At other times she is simply acerbic, which is pleasant if one agrees with her: "Cities like Albuquerque, Phoenix, Houston, and Denver may or may nor have a dense urban core floating somewhere in their bellies like a half-digested snack…"<br /><br />The thesis of the book is that the experience of walking is different depending on where you walk and why you walk - perhaps rather obvious, but she breaks it down. To whom is walking for leisure available? How does intent shape the experience of walking? As a consumer of hiking literature, I have read quite a few paeans to walking that glorify nature, preferably untrammeled, at the expense of urbanity, but Solnit's is more catholic, praising the woods, formal gardens, and dense urban cores alike. Its polar opposite is Cheryl Strayed's lovely <i>Wild</i>, which is an intense, highly personal illumination of one particular individual experiencing one kind of walking. (City walkers, in their turn, seem to suggest they consider any place else a bore.)<br />
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If one likes walking, <i>Wanderlust</i> is full of trivia that will enhance one's reputation with fellow enthusiasts. "Did you know," you can say at your next dinner party, "that the treadmill was invented a a tool to break the will of prisoners?" And if your guests are sociologists, follow up by drawing a parallel between it and the Panopticon, both of which modern society embraces. But as entertaining as the trivia is, the book is more worth reading for the connections it draws across and through ideas.Eve Properhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04026926577142821030noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8950974228498264098.post-90146976438807000502013-10-26T09:01:00.000-07:002013-10-30T16:16:49.055-07:00Meridian<i>Meridian</i><br>
Alice Walker
<p><i>Meridian</i> is part of the class of novels that centers on college, drawing deeply on the author’s experiences as an undergraduate student but extending chronologically past it. Other books in this canon include Ellison’s <i>Invisible Man</i> and Fitzgerald’s <i>This Side of Paradise</i>. There are other kinds of college student novels, of course, ranging from the unreflective celebration, often aimed at a pre-college audience, to the reflective glorification (<i>Stover at Yale</i>), to the scathing critique (<i>I am Charlotte Simmons</i> or <i>The Big U</i>). But in the case of <i>Invisible Man, This Side of Paradise</i> and <i>Meridian</i>, college represents a particularly important formative period in the protagonist’s life, and the college experience partially reflects the author’s own. After all, the recent Texas A&M alumnus doesn’t set his novel at Oberlin College, but at “Texas Ag.” The college novel is often also a first novel, which is one reason the college period is taken as transformative, even when the novel extends years past graduation.</p>
<p>Fitzgerald is the least imaginative of the bunch – I have the impression he took his own college experiences and simply added more money to his childhood. Walker doesn’t do this. While <i>Meridian</i>'s historically black women’s “Saxon College” is no doubt drawn from Spelman, where Walker started her undergraduate education, and the main character is the daughter of black Southern farmers, like Walker, the protagonist Meridian is not a version of the author. Perhaps this is due to this being Walker's second book. In any case, Walker uses settings and times she knows; Meridian's concerns may even be her own, but her story is a different one. If Walker is a voice of womanism, Meridian is its literal embodiment, becoming a saint-like figure.</p>
<p>Spelman, as Saxon, is depicted as a finishing school for women of the black upper class, a place where the Civil Rights movement is ignored because it isn't ladylike. The self-centeredness of the residential college experience that is celebrated in Stover at Yale is critiqued here. The rewards that accrue to the joiner and class leader aren't even mentioned, as Meridian is an outsider, partially by choice. In classic college novels, such as <i>Grace Harlowe's First Year at Overton College, Dolly's College Experiences</i>, and even the somewhat more redeeming <i>Anne of the Island</i>, having a close-knit group of girlfriends that strives to honor their class and college is portrayed as morally and mentally correct. Outsiders either see the errors of their ways or are lost. In <i>Meridian</i>, it is everyone else who is lost, while Meridian follows a true path, invisible to the rest.</p>Eve Properhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04026926577142821030noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8950974228498264098.post-4432426490817947322013-10-20T14:59:00.001-07:002013-10-20T14:59:29.846-07:00The Demon of Writing and the Myth of the Paperless Office<p><i>The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork</i><br>
Ben Kafka</p>
<p><i>The Myth of the Paperless Office</i><br>
Abigail J. Sellen and Richard H.R. Harper</p>
<p>Here we have two academic books about paper, one new and one old. <i>The Myth of the Paperless Office</i> deals with paper from the perspective of organizational behavior; <i>The Demon of Writing</i> deals with it in a manner that is historical, psychoanalytic, and political. <i>Paperless</i> addresses the uses of paper in the service of (presumably "good" - although readers may have their own opinions on the World Bank) organizational ends; <i>Demon</i> addresses how paper can both serve and subvert organizational ends, and those ends are, if not quite interrogated, at least critiqued. Both address what <i>Paperless</i> calls the affordances of paper - its ability to be written upon, shared, lost, or soaked in water and disposed of in the Seine. </p>
<p>That Sellen and Harper's book is readable isn't shocking, as both are industrial reseachers accustomed to explaining things to outsiders. More surprising is that Kafka's book is readable as well - Kafka writes with an accessible, even conversational, tone rare among those fluently conversant with Barthes and Zizek (admittedly, chapter four really does require at least a masters degree in a postmodern-influenced social sciences/humanities discipline to get through with one's self-esteem intact). This, surely, is one of the reasons it's become a hit, as much as academic books are ever "a hit." Humor even surfaces occasionally, as in Kafka's characterization of certain highly visible records as the "'charismatic megafauna' of paperwork," or in Sellen and Harper's discussion of their research at the World Bank. The thought of two ethnographers studying 500 economists is nearly irresistible to anyone in the social sciences, although the authors play this one straight.</p>
<p>In some sense, both volumes deal with the interplay of ideas, objects, and people, and the consequences of this interplay. "Not only was power resistible; it was water soluble," Kafka tells us. Sellen and Harper stay away from bigger ideas such as power in favor of ground-level questions such as <i>Does it work?</i> The latter book is outdated in some ways, of course; 11 years is a long time in tech. Today's entrepreneurs are unlikely to tear stories out of newspapers or carry beepers, and the book's prediction that the coming e-readers would be much more used for work than leisure reading has turned out precisely backwards. Yet much else has not changed; recently my students complained about e-textbooks because they don't have some of the affordances of paper, such as tactilely knowing how far you are in a document, or enabling a visual memory of where a particular passage is located. Sellen and Harper excel at documenting these issues and explaining why they aren't going away, even with technology-marinated generations replacing presumably hidebound older generations. </p>
<p>What both books bring home is how the technology of administration - be it oral, paperwork, or on a computers - shapes how work is done, but that shaping has limits. Replacing paper with computers doesn't endow computer screens with flexibility, portability, or high data density, just a few of the things paper excels at. But it would have freed up any number of copyists in the French Revolution to do more substantive work. </p>Eve Properhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04026926577142821030noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8950974228498264098.post-70331497469544769042013-10-13T16:06:00.002-07:002013-10-13T16:10:40.403-07:00Bleeding Edge<i>Bleeding Edge</i><br>
Thomas Pynchon
<p>Thomas Pynchon is back with what everyone notes is his first New York City novel, despite the fact that he has hidden in plain sight here for years. Given his penchant for technology and paranoia, it's almost inevitable that 9/11 is <i>Bleeding Edge</i>'s fulcrum, and given that he rarely writes about cultural moments at their heyday, it's fully inevitable that the aftermath of the dot-com bubble casts a long shadow over the scene - never nostalgically, of course.</p>
<p>It's a New York novel not just in setting but in its wealth of references, many of which stop short of name-dropping. (I imagine ladies who lunch discuss handbags in the same terms.) One gets used to missing some references when reading Pynchon; he writes as if every reader is working with the same map of ideas that he is. It isn't necessary to understand all of them, but the reader needs to understand some significant fraction of them. (At the time, I attributed the fact that I was one of very few students to finish <i>Gravity's Rainbow</i> when it was assigned in college to some superiority on my part; most likely, it was simply that I was a history of science major in addition to English.)</p>
<p>Some of these references are absolutely necessary, and Pynchon tends to write them as such: In <i>Bleeding Edge</i>, familiarity with the events of 9/11 is assumed. Others aren't, and catching them is simply a reward for in-group status. For those who have read both, it's hard not to consider <i>Bleeding Edge</i> and <i>Inherent Vice</i> as something of a matched set. Both are "minor" Pynchons, in the sense that they follow one character through one plot line; both are detective novels at heart, drawing on the noir tradition. <i>Vice</i> is set in LA, while <i>Edge</i> is set in New York City. These are cities most English speakers know something about, even if they've never visited, and both books are rife with references only those with quality time under their belts will get.</p>
<p>I've lived in New York for two years now, which in no sense makes me a "New Yorker," but it does provide me with a working knowledge of Manhattan, where most of the book's action takes place. I have seen many of the locales named and can identify many of those that aren't - the Ukrainian dumpling place in the LES is Veselka, for example. Throughout the book, I wondered how much non-New Yorkers would appreciate it. (There are far more Americans who have never been to NYC than the average New Yorker assumes, of course.) But I was able to enjoy <i>Vice</i> despite my scantier knowledge of LA, as someone who has both a New Yorker's <i>and</i> an Oregonian's attitude toward that place, and I ultimately concluded <i>Bleeding Edge</i> likely works in the same way.</p>
<p>What worked less well was the time spent online, in the world of DeepArcher, which is more or less a MMORPG minus the G. The version of future in which we use the internet as an imitation of geography stopped being relevant not long after <i>Snow Crash</i> - it works only in newer novels such as <i>Reamde</i> when it is explicitly a World of Warcraft-like game rather than the internet as a whole. Metaphors of physical travel from site to site went out with Geocities, and avatars reached their height of development with the Wii. It's hard to see DeepArcher as having any real bearing on what the internet actually looked like in 2001 - to say nothing of working well with the bandwidth of the time. It may be narratively easier to write the internet as place, but the result here is that the usually clear-sighted Pynchon seems to have slipped into a Gernsback Continuum moment.</p>
<p>This oddity aside, <i>Bleeding Edge</i> is vintage Pynchon, which means the top of your head is likely to come off at least a few times during reading, and that the NSA is probably having a hell of a time trying to grasp the meaning of his internet search history.</p>Eve Properhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04026926577142821030noreply@blogger.com