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Monthly Archives: September 2013

Genre vs. “Lit-ruh-chure” or, Why Christopher Beha is Dead Wrong

18 Wednesday Sep 2013

Posted by dougom in News, Opinion

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educating rita
Michael Caine and Julie Walters talking about LitRuhChure

I ordinarily don’t wade into fights between genre fans and the folks who stand guarding the ramparts of Real LitRuhChure (as Michael Caine so memorably pronounced it in “Educating Rita”–the star of which, by the way, is Molly Weasley).

For one thing, it’s usually a waste of time–there’s really no way you’re going to convince Lit folks–Lit professors, reviewers at the New York Times Book Review, and other Keepers of the Canon–that they should modify their rules.  You can complain about the over-abundance of dead white dudes, lobby for more people of color, demand more women, but they’re basically just going to ignore you.  So I usually don’t waste my breath, even though it does indeed drive me nuts.

There are folks out there battling away, though.  Jennifer Weiner, especially, is out there Fighting the Good Fight, particularly with regard to having more women be on the NY Times editorial board for the book reviews, and including more books written by women in their reviews.  (They are notoriously lame about inclusion.)  She also grinds my favorite axe, which is regarding “commercial” fiction which, in Christopher Beha’s long and–in my opinion–condescending response to Weiner he equates with “genre”, which is probably correct.

But the reason I’m writing about it today is because Junot Diaz basically exploded a huge segment of Beha’s argument.  Beha, who says that he “write[s] for the Times Book Review a fair amount”, said that the reason the NYT Book Review rarely reviews genre is:

[Genre] fiction, even when very well made, is designed to conform to the expectations of its genre or subgenre, and usually the best that can be said about any given example of it is that it does or does not succeed in conforming to those expectations.

(Which I’m sure comes as a big surprise to folks like William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, Neil Gaiman, and many, many others, along with the shades of A.C. Doyle, H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, Dickens (think “Edwin Drood”), Shakespeare (Think “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, for Pete’s sake!), and many, many others.  But never mind.)

Diaz disassembled this argument in a single sentence.

But ultimately, I think it’s a matter of privilege. Literary writers can attack new markets without ever losing their cachet as literary writers. I don’t think that tide has raised the boats of genre writers. A literary writer who writes a sci-fi novel will get a fucking Guggenheim. A genre writer who is classically genre, writing a genre book, will not get a fucking Guggenheim.

And let’s face it:  That’s basically it.  Privilege.  Is seems likely that Beha–in the incredibly unlikely event he reads this blog post–would be pissed off by this comparison, but to me this isn’t all that different from the Tea Partiers and their increasingly-desparate attempt to hold on to their generations-long electoral white dude advantage.  They are terrified of the coming onslaught of diversity, and are doing everything they can to avoid it.  They don’t understand it, and it scares them.

Similarly, it seems to me that Our Loyal Guardians of LitRuhChure don’t understand genre, the work of women writers, writers of color, trans writers, and you-name-it.  But there’s so much of it out there now, and the pressure for inclusion in our society is rising so much in recent decades, that it simply can’t be ignored.  So you get fights like the one between Weiner and Beha, and Beha’s pretty lame (and insanely lengthy) response.

I know you don’t like it, LitRuhChure folks, but one can find worthy works in any genre, be it science fiction, mystery, fantasy, romance, and yes even “classic” literature.  So instead of defending your increasingly-absurd positions, how’s about you open up your minds and be inclusive?  And you know what?  It’ll probably increase your readership, too.

Oh Goody, More War!

06 Friday Sep 2013

Posted by dougom in News, Opinion

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Congress, Obama, Senate, Syria

mccain_town_hall-620x412
John McCain getting ripped a new one by his constituents over Syria
(Photo courtesy of Salon.com)

To whatever extent one can get involved in a debate on Facebook, I was recently involved in one over Syria.  And my interlocutor used this analogy with regard to Syria (the “bullies” analogy, which I personally like in general):

Respond to a thug with a written list of grievances, and all you get is more thuggery; knock him upside the head with a bat, and you’ve got his attention.

The problem with that analogy is this:  If you are standing there watching a thug beat on someone, and you jump in and knock him upside the head with a bat, what’s the most likely outcome?  I think it’s obvious:

The thug will stop beating on his current victim and turn on you instead.  Or maybe the thug’s friends will jump you, having decided you’re a pushy busy-body and a bully your own self, and feel a need to protect their friend.

The analogy here is pretty clear:  Assad is a thug, and he’s beating on his own people.  And if we whap him upside the head, he’s going to either turn on us, or his friends (or the various American-hating terrorists around the world) are going to decide we’re being a bunch of bullies again ourselves and jump us.  And given our behavior in the last, oh, say 60 years, I think they have a strong case, don’t you?

And the case of Syria is even worse, right?  Because this is a case of us arriving at a scene late in the game, and we look down, and we see someone writhing on the ground and the bully standing over them.  A bunch of people in the crowd are yelling, “That bully tear-gassed that poor person!”  Yeah, maybe, but do you wade into the bully based solely on the say-so of a bunch of bystanders?  What do you do?

Let’s go ahead and push this analogy as far as we can:  What’s the “right” thing to do?  Well, it’s obvious:  You see someone getting beat on, you don’t jump in yourself, you call the police.  You ask for help.  In this case, the “police” are the UN weapons inspectors.  Let’s let them examine the victim and say, “Yeah, okay; he was tear-gassed all right.”  Then we get to decide if we play the role of police, or if we ask the world (again) for help, or what we do.  But to just wade in there with our baseball bat, without all the facts, when we weren’t even the ones being beat on, strikes me as reckless and foolish.  And let’s face it, folks:  We’ve done it before, and when has that ever turned out well?

(And before you say, “Kosovo”, let me point out:  The Europeans wanted us to fix the situation in Kosovo; they were too weenyish to do it themselves.  This time, all the folks involved don’t want us to butt in.  What does that tell you?)

More Big Media Company Silliness

01 Sunday Sep 2013

Posted by dougom in News, Opinion

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Game of Thrones, media, Paramount, piracy, Star Trek Into Darkness, The Oatmeal

chrispinezacharyquinto
Zachary Quinto’s squinty-face is due to him wondering how Paramount can be so durn dumb, I bet (Photo courtesy of the LA Times)

I have written quite a few times, in my own blog and as a regular poster on the (genuinely excellent tech review and commentary) site Gear Diary about the many stupidities of big media companies, and how many of their decisions increase rather than decrease the piracy they claim to fear so desperately.  I’m not going to rehash those arguments–you can google them up easily, and I think The Oatmeal sums them up perfectly in his cartoon about the unbelievable stupidity exhibited by HBO over “Game of Thrones” which, not to put too fine a point on, you quite literally can’t get legally in digital format for nearly a year after the episodes are broadcast unless . . . you subscribe to a cable company, and sign up for HBO, and sign up for HBO plus.  If HBO thinks that increases signup rates and decreases piracy, they’re deluding themselves.

But today’s rant comes to you courtesy of the upcoming DVD release of the new Star Trek movie.  Gigom notes in their excellent overview that the extras that you get for buying the Blu-ray release vary based on what store you buy them in, and also what country you reside in.  So if you want all the extras for that film–and believe me, I know plenty of Trekkies who will–you can either spend over a hundred bucks getting them legally by buying yourself multiple copies . . . or you can pirate.  And given that Trekkies are, as a group, fairly highly technically sophisticated, I’m guessing they’re not going to shell out more than a hundred smackers to line Paramount’s greedy-ass coffers, but rather will buy one copy and pirate the other extras on ThePirateBay.org or some other bittorrent site.  Because to do otherwise would be, frankly, stupid.

Bit media companies seem to operate based on two assumptions:  That their customers are deeply stupid, and that everyone wants to pirate and no one wants to pay.  Both these assumptions are fatally flawed, and the combination of them is what brings us to this pass, where media companies find their profit margins shrinking and respond by engaging in practices that will simultaneously drive up piracy and decrease their income.  Good plan, that, media companies!

You would think, nearly 20 years into the Web era, that big media companies would have learned how to adjust by now.  You would be wrong.

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