“The best fantasy is written in the language of dreams.”

Hoo boy. Do I ever not want to know what George R. R. Martin dreams about.

All right. Let’s back up. Hello, by the way, this is a blog, I keep abandoning it, the worst blogger is me, etc. Pretty much the only reason I’ve returned here “recently” (last post was in March! Geez) is because I want to Opine about something, and lo and behold, I have come here to do it again. Most of my writing energy these days goes straight into working on my novel draft, the still-untitled Terriblebook which is now clocking in at 118k. A little has been devoted to writing a play I shouldn’t be writing and composing the odd poem here and there. But! Discipline! At all times I try to tell myself that if I’m ever going to finish this  damn thing, I must keep going and save other projects for later. Chronological order or bust, you sons of mothers. On squeaky wheels of clunky sentences and excessive dialogue, yea, shall I reach the end of the line.

But Terriblebook is fantasy! And I have been thinking a lot about fantasy therefore. Which is why when I happened upon this George R. R. Martin quote (link is to his hilariously ’90s-tastic website) I could not resist having Opinions about it. Here is an excerpt:

Fantasy is silver and scarlet, indigo and azure, obsidian veined with gold and lapis lazuli. Reality is plywood and plastic, done up in mud brown and olive drab. Fantasy tastes of habaneros and honey, cinnamon and cloves, rare red meat and wines as sweet as summer. Reality is beans and tofu, and ashes at the end. Reality is the strip malls of Burbank, the smokestacks of Cleveland, a parking garage in Newark. Fantasy is the towers of Minas Tirith, the ancient stones of Gormenghast, the halls of Camelot. Fantasy flies on the wings of Icarus, reality on Southwest Airlines. Why do our dreams become so much smaller when they finally come true? 

Setting aside the purple prose-y quality of the quote (“obsidian veined with gold”? “wines as sweet as summer”? really?) and the general unevenness of its comparisons (honey is to  tofu as Cleveland is to Minas Tirith — wait — and anyone who flies Air Icarus is in for a nasty surprise!) … let’s talk about it.

Joel Stein, YA fiction, and the genre problem.

So this afternoon M & I got into a discussion about this charming column by Joel Stein.

If you just read it, go read M’s post about it over on Whoosh!, which succinctly outlines the several reasons why Mr. Stein has his head somewhere it shouldn’t fit. Stein’s point, for those who don’t want to waste the time it would take to scan his few fairly lame paragraphs, is (more or less) that it’s embarrassing to see adults reading YA fiction. They ought to stick to books of their own age level. Leave the YA to tween girls, everybody! Adults should rightly be reading serious, thought-provoking literature, and save the cheap entertainment for lesser media like movies or video games.

Yeah, I think he sounds like a pretentious twit too.

Note: Mr. Stein is ostensibly a humor writer, and he seems to subscribe to the school of humor that claims Brief Generalization is Funny; a Well-Argued Point Lacks Punch. Might we therefore take all this with a full shaker of salt? His satirical forays as a columnist for Time don’t seem to scream “Take my opinion seriously,” and indeed he was shocked that this July 2010 article, about the influx of Indian immigrants to his hometown in New Jersey, was considered offensive–because, you know, who ever got offended by race jokes? …If you’re thinking “What an idiot,” then you and I are on the same page, but that’s a sign of a dude who really does not know or care what he implies when he writes.

It’s lazy satire. Lazy satire of the kind that’s so sloppily composed it’s unclear how much the author means what he/she says–and this particular instance of it, while it may not mean well, means very little. As far as I can gather, Joel Stein is best-known for his few controversial columns, all of which got him attention for a while but weren’t, well…well-written enough to merit much more than he got. This is a guy who wields at most a plastic butter knife of satirical journalism. Fear him not, for he shall pass away.

Especially since his apparent refusal to research his topics will put him on a fast ship to the far island of Irrelevance. Seriously, man. If you’re going to make claims about YA fiction, at least try and pretend you’ve heard of something that wasn’t Harry Potter, Twilight, or The Hunger Games.

Which brings me to the point I came here to make. Or fail to make coherently; I think I’m running a fever right now. This dismissal of YA is misguided and possible because wow, do we ever not know what genres are. 

Asshat authors, ramble ramble ramble.

In my junior year of college, I took a class on W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot: a couple of sharp dudes with nothing in common save using two initials followed by a surname, the English language, and a talent for marvelous and memorable poetry. I love those guys. It was a wonderful class. There was one part about it I didn’t enjoy, though, and that was slogging through Lyndall Gordon’s Eliot biography.

That book, aptly titled T.S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life, is first of all roughly the length of a Robert Jordan novel and as badly in need of an editor, which is funny considering the former’s a ~ highly regarded piece of scholarship ~ and the latter a paperback fantasy. Secondly, I was expecting a biography and received rather more criticism than I might have liked. A little lit-crit sprinkled liberally throughout a study of the life of a poet is fairly inevitable, I suppose, but Gordon really goes to town for pages and pages. I remember forgetting when in Eliot’s life we were more than once. Give me Ellmann’s James Joyce any day of the week! ❤ Now there’s a bi0grapher-critic who knew when to dial down the analysis. That book’s huge, and even if I wasn’t a fan of Joyce I would have found it fascinating.

But I was a fan of Joyce when I read Ellmann–and more to the point, I had great affection for Joyce himself. Eliot’s poetry moved me and wowed me, but I hitherto had learned nothing about him as a person. As it turns out, Eliot was by and large a tremendous douche. Oops. Gordon to her credit makes no secret of this, displaying his intolerance and outrageous misogyny and general lack of sympathy or compassion clearly and thoroughly. The way he thought all women were virgins or whores and the appalling way he treated his own wife–eeuuuugh. You must imagine my shiver of disgust.

What really got my goat about Gordon’s book was that she showed symptoms of some kind of biographer’s Stockholm syndrome, and ended up an apologist for all Eliot’s unpleasant traits. But I forgive her this. I imagine enough research to write an 800-page biography (in tiny font) can do that to a person.

For my part, however, no matter how many times I reread Four Quartets out loud at the top of the stairwell, I’m never going to forget that Eliot was a wonderfully compelling and unhappy poet–who happened to be an unbelievable ass. It won’t stop me from enjoying his poetry, though. I mean, he’s dead now. He’s not hurting anyone else. And if I boycotted the work of every asshat author (especially on the basis of misogyny) I might be left with damn little to read.

Why am I talking about this?

This is why.

The Internet had another of its thousand thousand minor tremors per minute some weeks ago, a flutter of annoyed tweets and Facebook updates. I kept seeing links swapped back and forth concerning a book of Card’s, a re-telling of Hamlet entitled Hamlet’s Father. William Alexander’s review (linked above) was the first I’d heard of it.