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. 

The can of worms.

…so, M’s post on gendered protagonists in children’s films got me thinking about this Gender Business again. Oh dear.

In said post M posits that we ought to quit ascribing Dreadful Misogyny to Disney, as some have done, just for making more male protagonists than female protagonists. It’s not intentional sexism but good business practice: boys won’t watch “girl” movies but girls have no problem watching “boy” movies, hence more money will be made by producing the latter. We shouldn’t be afraid young girls will lack for role models; gender not being a personality trait, girls have no problem identifying with male protagonists.

I don’t really mean to argue with any of that.

What I’m here to consider–or, rather, to begin to consider before wandering off into worse-defined territory–is this bit from M’s post:  The only way to change this is to encourage little boys to identify with female characters, which people seem hesitant to do because they think it will encourage feminine tendencies and disconnect the boys from their own gender (and there’s a whole other can of worms I’m not prepared to touch at the moment).

That’s not the exact can of worms I want to open, but it’s on the same shelf, and I’ve my can opener at the ready. My views on…what, child development and exposure to media…aren’t very well-informed, and I can’t speak to the phobias afflicting this group and that group as far as Oh Noes, I Perceive a Lack of Manly Valor! etc. goes.

But when I read the above–when I read the post as a whole, actually–my primary thought was: “Well, geez, I rarely identified with female characters in children’s films, because so  many of them were, like…lame.”

Two things that need to be acknowledged before I go further. One, nothing I say’s going to constitute anything close to a thorough examination of any topic discussed. This is water-skeeter-talk, here. Two, any absolute or general statements made from this point on are in definite (if unavoidable) error, and exist primarily that I may vainly grasp at brevity.

Mmmmmkay. That said.

A month with no words. A month with a lot of words.

 

S-so it’s been over a month since last I wrote in here, and the last time I used it for its original purpose was Never Ago: I originally thought it’d be more a device for writing motivation on a schedule. However, it’s turned out to be a ‘blather on book-related subjects’ thing. That is OK with me. I miss booktalk. I miss the not-quite-English-majors of Marlboro College, careening from century to century and ism to ism, whipping themselves up into a frenzy over Grant Morrison as often as Virginia Woolf and everything outside and in between. I might miss them as an audience, too, but I seem to be content enough flinging things into corners of the Internet whether or not I expect anyone to pick ’em up, so…

At any rate, this is pretty much just me ducking into an empty room and waving a frantic hullo before dashing away. A more…what’s the opposite of inept? Ept? Dash it. I wish. A more effective writing motivator has returned to my life, and it’s, you guessed it! NaNoWriMo, back again to curb-stomp my better judgment and encourage gleeful writing sessions comparable to downing jugs of booze without a thought for tomorrow. You know that LMFAO song, yeah? Where they’re all “SHOTS! SHOTS! SHOTS! SHOTS! SHOTS!”    It’s like that, only WORDS! WORDS! WORDS! …Which would be an interesting way to deliver that line from Hamlet. 

But I’m digressing again. National Novel Writing Month, ladies and gents. Last year I was a dismal failure, since I had to prioritize Plan and Plan was all-consuming (though I like to think that even seven-words-in-a-day Joyce would have approved of the spirit of the thing). Three years prior, though, and way back in 2004, I was a so-to-speak winner and produced the requisite fifty thousand words in November. This is, however, the first year I’ve gone into November with something resembling a plot outline. I thought this would help speed things along. Instead, I seem to only be reaching the last third of my second chapter (of a planned twenty-four) and I’m already clocking in at over 16k. Welp. That’ll teach me to world-build. I’m turning into a regular Robert Jordan, and no, that’s not a compliment to myself.

Still, my hope is that once I finish the first draft–at this rate, somewhere in the soggy depths of January–I will have a nice thorough stack of pages to rip to pieces, re-pace, and rehaul. Verily I shall take my trusty scythe to the fields of clunky exposition and harvest worthwhile discoveries from it. Or. Er. Something along those lines. It’s my luck that mister syllable salad from the Dubious Multiverse has despite his antagonist’s nature taken the protagonist’s role, and his enormous ego means that he believes every thought in his head and fact in his book belongs in the text. Good for wordcount, good for figuring things out, wretched for brevity.

There are things I could and might discuss about the NaNo process and why it rocks, about my particular experience and this year’s project. For now, however–dashing off to pound out some more paragraphs on the darn thing. Good luck to my NaNo comrades! And to those not participating this year, I still heartily recommend at least one evening’s strangulation of the inner editor: a little unfettered, incoherent, blissful avalanching never hurt anybody.

At least not when the landscape of the avalanche is, like, Microsoft Word.

If you ain’t gettin’ drunk, get the fuck out the cluuuuuuuuuuuuuub!
E.

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.