storytelling

I should probably leave this alone, but then that would be cowardly. So please go read this post by Beth on the subject of reading and reviewing. Yes, Beth who hated A Breath of Snow and Ashes. And yes, there are curse words in the post, but you know what? It's a great post and she says some important things that most people are afraid to say.

So come back after you've read it, okay?

Now that you're back, I have a question.

What is life without passion, may I ask you? Boring. Beth is passionate about this subject of books. I think that's good. Of course, because I write novels for living, I'm happy that there are people like Beth out there who feel strongly about what I do.

Beth's argument goes something like this:

1. Some novels are badly written by even the most lax standards.
2. To pretend that there is no such thing as a poorly written novel does no good; in fact, it does harm.
3. Some people mistakenly equate criticism of a crappy novel as criticism of people who like the novel despite its inherent crappiness.
4. To avoid reader backlash arising from this basic mistake, many reviewers will resort to the "just not my cuppa tea" argument.
5. "Just not my cuppa tea" (JNMCT) arguments are intellectually suspect because they permit the reviewer to wiggle out of an honest assessment of any given novel.
6. This is particularly true in the romance community.

So my take on this: I agree with Beth that this is a big problem in the romance community.

In my opinion, however, there are times when it's intellectually dishonest not to acknowledge that JNMCT is appropriate. There are authors whose work I do not like. Here's a short list of titles from these authors. These are books I disliked intensely:

Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls
Joyce, Finnegan's Wake
Brown, Slow Heat in Heaven
Swerling, Shadowbrook

In two of these cases, I think JNMCT is appropriate: Hemingway and Joyce. In the other two, I would argue that these novels are poorly written. Each of them has dedicated readers, but that wouldn't change my opinion that the novels are seriously flawed in conception, design, craft and execution.

NOTE: If you are one of the many readers who adore Slow Heat in Heaven, I have no negative feelings about you. You probably like liver and the smell of cigar smoke, too. If we got to know each other we might become best friends, but no matter how solid our friendship, I would still maintain that Slow Heat in Heaven stinks like a cheap cigar.

On the other hand, I recognize that there is both craft and some dose of genius in the work of Hemingway and Joyce. My dislike of those authors' work has to do with my personal history and inclinations. It would be dishonest of me to claim that because I don't like them, there's nothing valuable to find in those works. For me, they are classic JNMCT.

So that's my argument for retaining the JNMCT ending to reviews. Just as long as it isn't being used as an easy out.

Posted by at 9:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (11) | TrackBacks (0)

I figured I should follow up funerals with something a little lighter, so here (via the radiant Robyn Bender) an essay from Steve Tilley, who writes for Sun Media. The essay is called "Are you thinking what I'm thinking? Then you owe me $20 milliion dollars."

And of course it's about Andrew F. Knight's dopey scheme to patent a plot, which I brought up a couple days ago, here.

Here's a bit of the essay. When you've stopped giggling, go read the whole thing, okay? He deserves your clicks, does Steve Tilley. Who wrote these words:

The actual patent application is about four quintillion pages long and makes my brain hurt, so we'll refer instead to a press release about the application.

The Zombie Stare "tells of an ambitious high school senior, consumed by anticipation of college admission, who prays one night to remain unconscious until receiving his MIT admissions letter."

OK, I'm already lost. Why would you have to pray to become unconscious? That's what tequila is for. This kid's not going to last a week in college if he doesn't know that.

It continues: "He consciously awakes 30 years later when he finally receives the letter, lost in the mail for so many years, and discovers that, to all external observers, he has lived an apparently normal life."

What the hell? Where do the undead come into the picture? Does he wake up to discover zombies have eaten his brain, and the cute co-eds at MIT are put off by the gaping, blood-encrusted hole in his skull?

No. In fact: "He desperately seeks to regain 30 years worth of memories lost as an unconscious philosophical zombie."

So it's not about zombies at all. It's a male version of 13 Going On 30. It's Fry from Futurama, give or take 970 years. It's Rip Van Freakin' Winkle - with a lot of sleepwalking.

Hey dude, Washington Irving called and he wants his story back. Yeah, he's been dead for almost 150 years, but he called from the grave because he's a non-philosophical zombie. You know, the kind that don't suck.

Posted by at 7:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I've always found funerals to be interesting in a variety of ways. So much that is normally hidden comes to the surface when you're confronting death. So this photo from the Bain Collection really grabbed my attention. A hugely elaborate funeral hearse being drawn by four white horses. Paris, May 5, 1913. The caption says only that this is the funeral of Isadora Duncan's children.

Isadora Duncan was just a name and a few facts to me when I first ran across this image. The mother of modern dance, flamboyant, controversial, that was about it.

So I did a brief search and found that a new biography of Isadora Duncan came out in 2001. There's an article about the biography at Salon, with a summary that tells me pretty much everything I need to know if I wanted to base a character on her life. Here's the relevant information about the funeral of her children from the article:

In 1913, her two children -- Deirdre, fathered by theater designer Gordon Craig, and Patrick, fathered by Paris Singer, the wealthy heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune -- drowned in the Seine when the driver of their car stepped out to crank the engine and failed to secure the brake. The Renault pitched over the embankment, trapping the two children and their nanny inside. One year later, a third child, who Duncan believed would be the reincarnation of either Deirdre or Patrick, died a few hours after birth.

Early May in Paris along the Seine. The trees showing new green, and the air warm to the skin. Lily of the Valley and daffodils in blossom everywhere, and windows open to let the bedding air. People waking from the winter.

A uniformed driver leaning over the crank of an expensive Renault, and the violent motion of the car as it jumps the bank and goes into the Seine.

This is the rear seat of a 1913 Renault. I can imagine the children sitting there with their nurse. Maybe she had been with them since birth, and they were as attached to her as they were to their mother. I wonder how well the nurse and the driver knew each other, if they were friendly or if there was animosity. I wonder how the driver survived that day, if he was charged with some crime and went to jail, if he lost his family, if he simply went on to his next job, or went into the army and died the next year when the war broke out.

I wonder how it is that he forgot to secure the brake, if he was preoccupied with the health of his own children or gambling debts or if he was new at his job and just not very careful. If he was worried about getting the children home late and losing his job, if he was irritated because he had told Isadora Duncan many times that the car was unpredictable and really should be taken out of service. If he hated the spoiled children or felt pity for them or nothing at all.

Of course there are answers to these questions. It might even be possible to find those answers in newspapers of the time, in police reports and letters and biographies. But I'm not so much interested in the details of what really happened. That was Isadora Duncan's tragedy, and what is going on in my head has to do with my imagination and a different story.

Which I have to put aside now, and get my mind back to New Orleans.

Posted by at 3:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)