greygirlbeast | "Yes, and of the sinners, too."

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"Yes, and of the sinners, too."

Erm....yeah, so....I'm not even pretending to be awake. I got to bed sometime after five ayem. Do I have a good excuse, I mean besides the tooth ache. No. Except that I discovered that Vampire: The Masquerade is loads more fun when played in Second Life than with pencil and paper on a tabletop. A new Nareth splinter came into being —— this time a wealthy, young Vietnamese woman dying of an incurable disease. She'd been an assassin, and had learned much of the art of torture, before the illness. She used the last of her fortune to find the Sabbat. Accompanied by her bodyguards (thanks Pontifex and Misi), she entered the city, and contact was made, thanks to a nervous little man, some sort of private investigator. Much time was spent sitting in the painfully over-lit lobby of the Lincoln Hotel, vomiting onto the powder-blue carpet between her feet because the morphine she'd just injected was making her sick. She speaks in French about half the time. She told the bodyguards that their final checks were in their rooms and dismissed them, then sat and waited for the Ravnos woman she been promised would find her. Every moment the dying assassin waited was agony. But the vampire came, finally, the woman named Mara, and the assassin was led to the back room of a seedy little nightclub, where she was questioned, then allowed her first taste, and promised the embrace. She was given a slip of paper with an address, and ordered not to return to her hotel room. Then her typist went the hell to bed.

That's why I'm not awake. What noisy cats are we.

After the minute brouhaha which led to my entry on Saturday, I just keep thinks (as Ceiling Cat would say), "But aren't authors supposed to be critics?" No, not book reviewers. Critics. Isn't that one of the things authors are supposed to do, comment on the work of other authors? Hell, if anything, I think I've been neglectful of that duty. Aren't we supposed to try to keep one another honest by saying what we think about the State of Literature, including the State of Genre Literature? To quote the ever quotable Dorothy Parker, "This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force." (quoted in The Algonquin Wits [1968] edited. by Robert E. Drennan). Is that not a duty that we have, as authors, not merely to make shows of empty, token support but when something's shit, to say so? And so when I see these followers of a hack like the wildly successful and admittedly deceased Robert Jordan, when I talk to people who can quote his The Wheel of Time chapter and verse, but who have never even read Tolkien, is it not my responsibility to get pissed off, and to say so? I think it is. Though, I should add, before hurling one of Jordan's books anywhere with great force, the reader should acquire a trebuchet, lest a shoulder be dislocated in the process.

Spooky did the Day in the Life (didl) thing a couple of days back. You can see the fruits of her labour, and quite a bit of Providence and Casa de Kiernan y Pollnac here.

Yesterday, in preparation for writing my introduction on Arthur Machen today, I read "The White People" (1904) again, my second favourite story by him. And re-read much of Wesley D. Sweetser's 1958 thesis on Machen (published in 1964), along with various other bits of criticism. I suppose that far fewer people these days read Machen than read Robert Jordan, or even Tolkien, but its their loss. "The White People" is sublime. And it has such an exquisite opening line —— "'Sorcery and sanctity,' said Ambrose, 'these are the only realities. Each is an ecstasy, a withdrawal from the common life.'"

I was saddened this morning to learn of the death of illustrator Pauline Baynes (1922-2008). When I was a teenager, it was her wonderful map of Middle Earth that adorned my bedroom wall. When I first found Farmer Giles of Ham, The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, and Smith of Wootton Major, she was the artist whose work accompanied the text.

Spooky has relisted several items on eBay, so please have a look. Also, if I fail to shill both A is for Alien and the mass-market paperback of Daughter of Hounds, the platypus will be showing me those venomous spurs.

More coffee....

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Apologies in advance for the length and anger of this comment.

Isn't that one of the things authors are supposed to do, comment on the work of other authors?

Not in SF, it isn't. Criticism is expressly forbidden in genre, or hadn't you heard? Academics can wank about "the closet economy of uni-hornal chastity in early Beagle," but other than that, it's expected that you smile and make nice. Because we're a community. And communities are helpful, and supportive, and they don't say mean things to each other! Because we aren't writing literature here, we're having fun! Dude, don't piss in the Cheerios!!! Being harsh is, well, harsh, and we don't like that here. You can take your harsh over to ~~those mean people in literary fiction who bag on each other constantly~~ Gawker! (Even the lit fic people don't criticize too much anymore.)

I am, and have for a long time been, having trouble coming to grips with the schizophrenia of SF. Some authors are doing it because they love it, to tell fun stories that people will enjoy, and who are (implicitly if not explicitly) going to be hurt and offended by criticism. At best they'll think it not relevant. Other authors are doing it for all the reasons people who strive to write great fiction do so, but even there I don't see too much criticism, thought perhaps I'm looking in the wrong place. And because of the non-critical culture, I always have the feeling that criticism is always perceived as a personal attack (which it sometimes is, sometimes isn't).

It's all about the cult of the fan: consuming and enjoying and not evaluating. Is it right to criticize people who aren't trying to Write Serious Fiction? Is it right to say "dude I really loved [title] because of the fight scenes" to someone who labored three years to create (what the author hopes will be) an immortal opus? I don't know the answers, but I know that I am frustrated by lack of a serious critical culture. (Which means, I suppose, that I should go out and write some, but that's a story for another day.)

Not in SF, it isn't. Criticism is expressly forbidden in genre, or hadn't you heard? Academics can wank about "the closet economy of uni-hornal chastity in early Beagle," but other than that, it's expected that you smile and make nice. Because we're a community. And communities are helpful, and supportive, and they don't say mean things to each other! Because we aren't writing literature here, we're having fun! Dude, don't piss in the Cheerios!!! Being harsh is, well, harsh, and we don't like that here.

*blink*

You're joking, right? I mean, we're not talking about fanfic...

the non-critical culture

Herein lies the problem.

May I quote this comment in tomorrow's entry?

Quote away. I was only half-joking. As a burgeoning/would-be literary fantasist, my indoctrination to SF culture has thus far come via LiveJournal, blogs, online mags, and one conference. The culture I have encountered so far is largely non-critical, and my general sense is that most people simply prefer not to engage critically. They avoid it because they don't like being mean (or being perceived as such), because they have an uncritical/fannish love of SF, and because they are afraid that it will come back on them in the form of damage to their career.

To take Robert Jordan as an example... I think the vast majority of people know that, literarily speaking, the World of Time is not very good. Epic sweep, brave in various ways, often quite deep world building, but beset by many problems as fiction. This is not something I have often found discussed in print, in detail, barring occasional rants by disenchanted readers. The encomiums when he died were prolific, and this is perhaps understandable, as people do not like to speak ill of the dead. But I know there is deep, seething frustration out there about the proliferation of his work that drives many people to distraction, and it's not often discussed. Critical consideration of the sorrows of epic fantasy is not required reading for would-be epic fantasists, and that's a goddamn shame.

Surely I am not the only one who literally shook with rage when he died, having written eleven fucking volumes of the Wheel of Time, without having finished the job. That he suffered from cardiac amyloidosis and died fairly young is a sad thing, and I have deep sympathy for his family, but nowhere in print have I ever seen it suggested that he failed to bring to completion what should have been an entire work, awaiting the completion of which many fans gamely followed along for a decade and a half. That his failure in this regard is not discussed, to say nothing of his other failings as a writer, is also a goddamn shame.

And should a RJ fan come along and read this and start frothing, NO I have not written anything half as magical, lengthy, and wonderful. NO I have no plans to write a 12-book series. NO I will not shut up.

Surely I am not the only one who literally shook with rage when he died, having written eleven fucking volumes of the Wheel of Time, without having finished the job. That he suffered from cardiac amyloidosis and died fairly young is a sad thing, and I have deep sympathy for his family, but nowhere in print have I ever seen it suggested that he failed to bring to completion what should have been an entire work, awaiting the completion of which many fans gamely followed along for a decade and a half. That his failure in this regard is not discussed, to say nothing of his other failings as a writer, is also a goddamn shame.

I'm not sure what you're saying here. I mean, I blame him for being so needlessly long-winded, but I can hardly blame him for dying with the work unfinished. It's not like it was his choice...so far as I know.

The long-winded thing. Many's the time I've heard people discuss the ways in which the latter books of the series amounted to storm and strife that resulted in no meaningful development in the plot. Instead of reigning in a tendency to bloat that makes Stephen King look like Raymond Carver, he indulged it literally up to the point where he died before finishing.

I know you're decidedly against the concept of reader-writer contract (or at least, against fannish demands), but I think that if one is presenting a tale in the traditional manner one has a moral obligation to finish it, simply by the nature of stories being what they are. Whatever the ending is, you have to point at it and say "the end," even if Luke is thirty meters from the exhaust port and we don't know if the photon torpedo is going in. RJ did his best, as far as handing on the duty of completion to Brandon Sanderson, but that he himself did not do it... It's a problem.

I know you're decidedly against the concept of reader-writer contract

Decidedly is an understatement.

but I think that if one is presenting a tale in the traditional manner one has a moral obligation to finish it, simply by the nature of stories being what they are. Whatever the ending is, you have to point at it and say "the end," even if Luke is thirty meters from the exhaust port and we don't know if the photon torpedo is going in. RJ did his best, as far as handing on the duty of completion to Brandon Sanderson, but that he himself did not do it... It's a problem.

I do agree that unfinished stories are unsightly. But. Jordan frakkin' died. It's not like he scheduled that or did it to inconvenience his readers. Hell, Tolkien died with what he considered his major work unfinished. It happens. Especially when one works on such a scale.

And by "morality," I'm talking about the essentially moral nature of storytelling, a la John Gardner, not "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's plush Cthulhu."

And by "morality," I'm talking about the essentially moral nature of storytelling, a la John Gardner, not "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's plush Cthulhu."

I would note that mortality is rather indifferent to any sort of morality or art. And Jesus fuck, you've got me defending Robert Jordan....

"Jesus fuck, you've got me defending Robert Jordan...."

Isn't debate fun!

I've got to say though, untimely death and all, he could have finished the story in six books. Easily. I began to feel like he was just milking it. Hence my previous comments regarding flatlined plots.

Isn't debate fun!

No.

I've got to say though, untimely death and all, he could have finished the story in six books. Easily. I began to feel like he was just milking it.

And it's not like Jordan is alone in this transgression. It has been epidemic in contemporary fantasy.

At one point, somewhere or another, I read an argument that Eye of the World (book 1) was written in such a way that it suggested something structured as a trilogy. I have no idea about this, or about how long he originally thought it would be, or if he just said "let's see how far I can carry this tale." I do know, however, that upon re-reading book 1 after having heard the argument, I more or less agreed.

Ordinarily one completes a story that one tells to other people, for the reason that stories, by their very nature, have beginnings and endings. Even if that ending looks wholly unlike what one typically thinks of as an ending, one ends the story. Perhaps it could be more profitably described as "being true to the story."

If you've never heard of it, John Gardner wrote an odd book of criticism called On Moral Fiction (http://www.amazon.com/Moral-Fiction-Harper-Torchbook-5069/dp/0465052266). It was all about his particular literary-critical battles, and what his vision of story was. I don't agree with all of it, and I recall not understanding all of it when I did read it, but it certainly was interesting. I am probably in some sense stretching his definition of "moral," but I thought it fit the point.

f you've never heard of it, John Gardner wrote an odd book of criticism called On Moral Fiction.

I was rather unduly fond of that book for a time. Even read aloud from it at a Dragon*Con panel, once.

Ordinarily one completes a story that one tells to other people, for the reason that stories, by their very nature, have beginnings and endings. Even if that ending looks wholly unlike what one typically thinks of as an ending, one ends the story. Perhaps it could be more profitably described as "being true to the story."

But I think you're missing my point. Death can occur, literally, at any point and without warning. So, even if I plan, in good faith, to tell you a "whole" story, start to finish, orally, and calculate it will take me only fifteen minutes to do so, there's no guarantee I'll reach the end. It seems to me that you are suggesting that anyone who dares begin a story risks an immoral act simply because hesheit may not live to finish the story.

Hmmm. That's a very good point, especially when you put it that way. I guess, then, that my frustration should be more with his long-windedness.

Sorry if I've seemed pushy or argumentative about this -- not trying to rampage through your LJ.

Actually, you're right on the money about far too many fans taking legitimate criticism as a personal attack. I used to describe the phenomenon as "the Church of Saint Spock the Pointyeared", because it's almost identical to the response from a religious fanatic toward any criticism of his/her faith, whether or not it's justified. In the light stages, it's the whining of "Can't you just have fun with it?" when someone makes light of George Lucas's lack of storytelling ability; in extreme cases, well, you have the Cat Piss Men who attempt violence (and sometimes succeed) against a complete stranger who dared state an opinion other than what the Cat Piss Man wanted to hear.

By way of example, back in the early Eighties, Starlog magazine used to have a summer review issue, where various esteemed science fiction, fantasy, and horror authors would review the summer's genre films. Robert Bloch reviewing Gremlins, Theodore Sturgeon reviewing The Last Starfighter, and the like. The shrieking was long and loud from the CPM contingent when Norman Spinrad dared poke big holes in the plot and characterization of Return of the Jedi at the end of 1983, but you had no idea of the screaming a year later when Arthur C. Clarke dared note that Star Trek III wasn't a particularly good movie. I'm ashamed to say that I still know people in Dallas fandom (although I haven't associated with them in years) who still refuse to read anything by Spinrad or Clarke, not based on tastes in fiction, but because they dared blaspheme against the Church of Skiffy, where we have to endorse everything no matter how bad it may be because "we fans have to stick together."

who still refuse to read anything by Spinrad or Clarke, not based on tastes in fiction, but because they dared blaspheme against the Church of Skiffy, where we have to endorse everything no matter how bad it may be because "we fans have to stick together."

::sigh::

That's the dictionary definition of "childish," I do believe. And the Cat Piss Men are frequently on my mind when I think about this subject. :)

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