See Dick Run... Run You Dick, Run

I wasn't surprised when "chick lit" was followed by "dick lit"(1). I was, however, taken aback by "dead chick lit." I don't like the direction this is taking... 



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How about: "BicLit" for smokers, pyromaniacs and arsonists: "HickLit" for rednecks; "KickLit" for martial artists; "LickLit" as a special subcategory of ChickLit just for lesbians, or maybe just for people who like icecream; "MickLit" for the Irish; "NickLit" for television-addicted kids (a la Nickelodeon); "PickLit" for nose pickers; "PrickLit" for assholes; "QuickLit" for wise and witty people; "RickLit" just for those who Moodie a whole lot, "SickLit" for fans of blood and gore, "TickLit" for entomologists; "ThickLit" for the dim-witted; "TrickLit" for johns and prostitutes; "VicksLit" for people with chest colds, and "WickLit" for all those candlestick makers out there.

Oh, and notice how the Guardian refers to Vancouver writer Nancy Lee as "Cardiff-born Nancy Lee"... effectively covering-up the shame of her Canadianness, as though British readers would turn-up their noses in disgust if they knew where she really lives, or where her stories are set. Hmmm....

Anyone else find both "The Lovely Bones" and "Dead Girls" overhyped, sentimental and overall poorly written (especially the predictable and saccharine Sebold novel)? The reviewer mentions in this article that parts of "Dead Girls" read like creative writing class exercises, and I think that may be accurate... anyone else care to comment?

Edited by author 09-03-2003 07:26 PM
I'll take a piece of that, Anne. Isn't Nancy Lee a graduate of the UBC creative writing program? Over the past handful of years I couldn't help but notice a kind of homogeneous quality to the writing coming from that program. And other Canadian CW programs for that matter, like York's, like UNB's. Are these programs little more that style factories, churning out writers with similar habits year after year? It seems to be to an occupational hazard with doing a creative writing degree. When a student knows his or her work will be evaluated by a certain individual, or small group of individuals, wouldn't it be natural to write what will please one's supervisor(s) most? Wouldn't this naturally churn out a number of writers who all learned how to write the same way, in the same environment? Wouldn't this trend eventually become noticable? Perhaps the stories actually were written as creative writing class excercises. Perhaps the reviewer hit the nail on the head.

So FK, did you actually read Dead Girls? It’s unclear from the post. It’s also unclear what you mean by "homogeneous quality." Do you mean Nancy Lee’s style is the same as other UBC grads, such as, say, Michael Smith? Or Zsuzsi Gartner? Or Kevin Chong? Or Andrew Gray? Or Stephanie Bolster? It’s fine if you don’t like Dead Girls (I personally liked it), but to dismiss writers simply because they went through a specific program is, I think, misguided. After all, weren’t you part of a snobby writing clique at Western?

And the reviewer doesn’t really make a bad statement about Lee’s stories smacking of creative writing assignments. Here’s the full quote from the article:

"The diversity of voices in Dead Girls smacks of creative writing assignments, but then perhaps Lee does herself a disservice by making it all look so easy, for these are assured and immensely readable stories."

As for The Lovely Bones, I had mixed feelings about it. I liked the premise, and thought it started off strong with all sorts of eerieness and nastiness and weird voyeurism, but then Sebold got all sentimental and cathartic with it, which ruined what came before. I wrote a review of it for eye weekly that was never published, where I said it suddenly turned into an episode of Touched By an Angel — especially when the dead girl comes back to Earth. I didn’t find it predictable, because the direction it took was so bad and juvenile that I was actually surprised. But yeah, it did turn out to be pretty saccharine. I guess it’s not surprising that she took that direction, though, given the book’s inspiration. For the record, I thought Lucky, Sebold’s nonfiction book of her rape, was better (if you can say that), insofar as it was, I don’t know, somehow more honest. I think it was honest anyway.

Edited by author 09-04-2003 05:57 AM
Peter, to answer your question: Yes, I did read Dead Girls. (No, seriously, I did.) And I know this was not clear from my post, but yes, there were many things I liked about it. BUT! Yes, there are also things about it that I found eerily similar to the work of other recent UBC grads, like, say, yes, Zsuzsi Gartner, or for example Aislin Hunter. But it’s late, and without going through the books line by line, I couldn't exactly illustrate specifically what it is I mean, so I won't embarrass myself by trying, but it is something I've noticed: a certain style, a certain way of writing, a certain sound, in the same way Seattle grunge bands all had a certain communal sound, or say, the way American abstract expressionist painters were distinct from European abstract expressionists, or the way the TISH poets likened themselves to Black Mountain, or what have you. It amounts to, and perhaps this is an appropriate term, an identifiable "school" of writing. Do you think I'm way off the mark here? And even so, the very fact that I've made this observation isn't meant as a blanket dismissal of the work of Smith or Chong or Lee or Bolster or Gartner. Far from it. It's just an observation. Following my own trope, I wouldn't similarly dismiss all grunge music because it sounded like "grunge". (Okay, so I'm not hip to the current music. I was born 40. Sue me.)

And as for your other question, was I part of a snobby creative writing clique at Western? How could anything that didn't have to do with income or fashion be snobby at Western? And if I were part of any such clique, it would have been the same one that you belonged to, old chum. But that said, I wouldn’t want to credit UWO with having any kind of atmosphere especially tailored or conducive to creative writing (remember Bruce Lord? or J.D. LaFrance?), which actually might have been for the best…who knows? If UWO did have a CW program, there’d just be that many more trained-monkey prose-drones pumping out similar work and clogging up Double Day’s slush pile with first novels that all have the same kind of plot development and prose style. And wouldn't that get boring? (Not that I'm saying it already is.) :) <[sneaky emoticon face]

Edited by author 09-04-2003 01:04 PM
Not that I'm implying any of the heretofore mentioned writers write like trained monkeys, but not everyone who get's a creative writing degree eventually goes on to a career in literature. Those are the prose-drones I'm talking about... the ones that don't cut the mustard.

I reviewed Dead Girls and All the Anxious Girls on Earth for a piece I did in the Citizen and I really didn't see much similarity in style (other than "Girls" in their titles). But maybe it's just a subjective thing, so we'll have to leave it at that. And I haven't read Hunter, so I can't comment on her writing.

And, you know, ultimately, you can always draw connections between disparate things if you want. The reviewer did that for a hook, which was fair enough.

But there does need to be a limit. A reviewer once complained about my misreading of Salinger, which I thought was pushing things, given I've only ever read one Salinger story (and it didn't really have a profound impact on my book). And let's not even talk about Kinsella connecting my work to a "1960s comedian named Jackie Vernon." Let the work stand on its own and don't worry about finding ways to discount it on its extratextual elements. Or even its paratextual elements....

That writing clique thing was an in-joke, but now you've gone and outed me.

Peter, I'm not so much trying to discredit anyone's work in particular as I'm hoping to spark up a discussion about creative writing schools. Are they factories? Are they, at least pertially, to blame for things like the lack of humour in Canadian literature (see the Trash Talk discussion board on Bookninja). Hasn't Gordon Lish and Iowa in the states been accused to churning out "clones" as well? Is it an issue?

Where the hell did Anne go?

Dubbed 'Chub Lit' it's Chick Lit and Dick Lit for Big Gits

At 274 pages I think it barely makes it to Big-boned Lit.




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I guess I was just too far ahead of the trend to make it into the anthology!

Edited by author 09-26-2003 08:14 PM
TFK,

Speakin as a CW dropout, I think it is an issue.

Alex Good has an interesting piece on his site about how so few writers have anything to say about work anymore. I think it's a propos.

http://www.goodreports.net/work.htm

Z.,

Haven't had a chance to read all of Good's essay yet, so I can't comment on it now. But I've had some lousy jobs, that's for sure.

Tell me about it! But the lousy ones, I've found, or the lousy moments in good jobs, make for the best fodder.

A tip of the hat, then, to all things lousy!
May the cud keep coming up - chew chew chew!

That's one of the great things about art, ain't it? Its capacity for sublimating the lousy into the beautiful, I mean. But maybe I've been reading too much Celan lately, I dunno...

Doesn't This Strike You as Logically Akin to Having a Straight Pride Day Parade?

A publisher for men and men only. Just like 20 years ago.




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So Bookninja, is "new dad stuff, all namby pamby touchy-feely"?

"Where are all the great buccaneering, derring-do, true-life adventures and cowboy stories?" Check the outhouse, dude! Oops, pardon me, gentle reader, if your derriere is no derring-doer of the plein-air loo.

At last! A home for my epic on hard-drinkin, womanisin high Arctic freight handlers. Thank you, Spitfire!

Clever, Twinkle! I find this kind of "men's movement" thing laughable. Go beat a drum and chant until you cry. Then fix a car and toss a ball around to reaffirm to a world who wasn't watching that you still have nuts. Bah.

I don't read new dad stuff. This new dad has just finished Coetzee, Malouf, Muldoon, and Dunn, and is rereading Yevtushenko, Seiferle, LoveGrove, and O'Meara. And we all know how touchy-feely Coetzee can be. He really pulls those punches.

I thought the Men's movement was an early nineties flash in the pan. All that Iron John stuff.

It wasn't without its merits perhaps. At the time, and maybe even today, some guys out there need(ed) to learn how to take pride in masculinity without being chauvinist, or (if they attended university in the early 90s) without feeling some kind of pro-feminist guilt about being male.

This might sound silly, but it’s a very real phenomenon that isn’t discussed much. I know I went through a period where I felt implicated in the crimes of the patriarchy, without, say, having committed any of them myself. I once had a professor tell me (while I was still her student) that I shouldn’t be a writer because, as a male, I had nothing valid to say anymore. Of course, I didn’t believe her, but her comment did have an effect on me. At the time, I wasn’t getting the message from anyone that it was okay to be male. Maybe I needed someone to tell me otherwise, though I doubt beating a drum in the woods with Robert Bly would have been the best way to go about it.

Neither, I would think, is Spitfire going to do what they think they’re going to do, saying “Now it's time for us to have ours to redress the balance because men are not getting a fair crack of the whip.”

Exsqueeze me? Baking powder?

Is there really a shortage of mannish adventure stories out there? If they simply announced themselves as new publishers dedicated to adventure fiction, no one would probably have batted an eye, but setting themselves up as an alternative to Virago, and pretending to “redress the balance” is laughable. There’s all kinds of “men’s fiction” out there. Maybe what they’re reacting against is how out of vogue it is at the moment, though I don’t think Elmore Leonard, Cormack McCarthy, Tom Clancy, or the James Bond franchise is suffering for it.

Actually, Elmore Leonard is cool again, right?

I'd add Peter Carey's "The True History of the Kelly Gang" to the list of masculine books that don't do us men a disservice. I think there's a real re-awakening of interest in 'adventure fiction' amongst highly literate readers of both sexes. My girlfriend just picked up a McCarthy title and my mother-in-common-law just read Guy Vanderhaeghe's (sp?) "The Last Crossing" and has said she's only into reading 'cowboys and indians' these days. And me, I can't get enough of Melville, Conrad and Stevenson. Probably a reaction to the spate of domestic/historical fiction of the last couple decades.

Not to be contentious and nitpicky, but saying "I felt implicated in the crimes of the patriarchy, without, say, having committed any of them myself" IS a crime of the patriarchy.

I think we have to realize that before this discussion can go on. No one is innocent of it. Men and women both support the system by playing into the scripts and structures. You can't avoid it to some degree. It's only your awareness of this, and active personal participation against it, that counts as progress, I think.

Edited by author 10-15-2003 11:52 AM
To be contentious and nitpicky, that's silly. As a white man working in the north for an airline, I felt very much implicated in the continuing subjugation and dislocation of the Inuit peoples, but I have never had a similar feeling vis-a-vis women. As far as I can see, women of my age and socio-economic class have had every advantage, if not more, that the men have had. Perhaps my conduct in relationships has not always been exemplary, but I have never struck or verbally abused a woman I was with. If I've ever been a cad, I'm quite confident in saying that I'd have been a cad if I was gay, too.

Just what is this 'system' you allude to, Bookninja? Women and men are biologically different creatures. Men can't be women and women can't be men--at least not without surgery. If these are 'scripts' and 'structures' then they're immutable ones and 'fighting against it' is a fool's errand.

Anyone notice what that damn Google ad-spider is doing with this thread?

The Matrix.

No, seriously, there are social structures and systems (in which we are currently playing) that can't be eluded. It seems there is a fundamental gap here in understanding that maybe we shouldn't get into. Striking and/or abusing a woman isn't the part of patriarchal power structures I'm referring to. It's willfully ignoring the existing power imbalance by implying that some sort of change has already occurred and that some pendulum of power has swung too far in the other direction. It's kidding yourself into thinking that your own advantages aren't disadvantaging others. That's as absurd as believing western society is anything but a bunch of tight-assed Victorians with computers. We may be on the cusp of change (from a historical perspective we can't see from yet) but we have not really changed.

Women of our age and socio-economic class are still trained from birth to feel guilty for doing anything that isn't in the kitchen. This is documented fact, not nitpicking. I was couching the last comment in nitpicky because I know TFK didn't mean what he said. He was trying to make a point and my pointing out his language choice was part of my own battle against these kinds of inequities.

Sure, there have been advances, but there have also been regressions. Why are women afraid to call themselves feminists? You'll never land a man that way, sweetheart. Seriously, I am sick of this new trend of hearing middle class white men complain about what it's like to be marginalized. How? It's so perposterous.

BTW, gay men are part of the patriarchy too.

Not you, too, George…accusing me of the crimes of the patriarchy. Sheesh!

George, what I meant by never having committed the crimes of the patriarchy is that I've never been rich or powerful, I've never held political sway, I've never assaulted or harassed anyone, I've never kept anyone's salary under a glass ceiling, etc. etc.

Yet, somehow, in the early 90s, I was still made to share in the culpability for these things. The sins of the father visited upon the son. It was quite a shock to suddenly be faced with the powerful ideology that my gender invalidated me to a large extent. And sure, it was a wake up call. Sure, I realised that this was a mere turning of the tables, so to speak, that for centuries it had been the other way around. I was aware of it, and I was sensitive to it. Perhaps this wasn’t your experience, but it was mine. And I’m not anti-feminist, if it sounds that way. I’m not unaware of the issues and factors involved, if that what’s you’re suggesting. I’m a firm believer in equality and equal opportunity across the board.

I’m also a firm believer that boys and young men should be educated in the injustices of history, but they shouldn’t be punished for the past or be made to feel guilty by proxy. There’s nothing to be gained from diminishing the self-esteem of boys under the guise of levelling the historical playing field. Thankfully, this trend seems to have mostly diminished.

I'd say something, but The Fat Kid has said it all. Except this: extant inequalities have far more to do with class and race than sex.

Maybe women don't want to identify as feminists because of stories like this: "I once had a professor tell me (while I was still her student) that I shouldn’t be a writer because, as a male, I had nothing valid to say anymore."

"I've never been rich or powerful"
eek! Be careful, FK - that depends on who you are compared to. Do you not think others might view you as both rich and powerful?
About power -- just a couple obvious points for starters: You're employed. Power. Well-educated. Power. You have command of language. Power. You're an editor at a press. Power. You ran the IV Lounge readings - no power there? eeeeeeek!
FK, ya look pretty powerful from where I'm standing...

Zsa Zsa, would you extend your analogy to cases like:

-People don't want to be Muslim anymore because of 9/11

-People don't want to be Christian anymore because of the Crusades, kiddy-diddling priests, missionary activities...why does anyone want to be Christian anymore?

TFK's prof sounds like a bit of a zealot. Most feminists are quite reasonable people, however. So why the trend away from it, if there is one? Is bookninja right about anxiety re: getting a man, or is it simply perceived as no longer relevant to the majority of educated MC women?

ninjaz, I see all your points there, as I have been in the habit of seeing them since my own university days, a little earlier than That Fat Kid Show, but I have to agree with the sentiment of TFK. It is tiring feeling so guilty all the time, especially when much of one's energy goes into fighting the crap, rather than participating in it. Yes, I'm powerful and privileged in comparison to someone else. Try not being. It sucks. Consider the worm... worm!, sucking up dirt all day and dying in the sudden sun on a dry sidewalk? Luxury! Try being a dust mite.

And really, we are just talking about marketing after all. This Spitfire jab is just to get the press. They succeeded. They get to play in the big sandbox for awhile, and if their books are shite they will disappear.

How many waves does feminism get before it is considered just part of the general surf of human existence?

Peace out. Jesus loves you.

Ha, ha. That's funny. Really, I think it is. I guess you could make all kinds of analogies along those lines. That's a good reason not to gather under any flag. People just get fed up dealing with the hardliners in any group, cuz the hardliners think that everything would be fine if everyone just wrote, oops, I mean, thought and acted like them.

Three cheers for Bookninja! No, I'd agree that race and class are in many ways bigger obstacles - that is to say that as a middle class white woman, I have a MUCH easier time of it than a dirt poor black man most likely does. But that doesn't mean that sexism isn't still alive and well in Canada - and in literary circles. For example, I once read at the same spoken word event as my partner. He read first, and after around half an hour, it was my turn. I was introduced as his girlfriend. I was the only woman who read that night and no less than 3 of the readers that night had written stories about dead women (and a few of the others had written about their sexual prowess). In all, it was NOT a friendly atmosphere for women - something I've noticed from time to time in the spoken word community, though this is not consistent. Sure, compared to other inequalities, that sort of thing seems and is minor - but let's not kid ourselves that everything is "fixed" up now.

Madeleine, not only do you have more advantages than a dirt-poor black man, you have more advantages than a middle-income working class rural white man--which is not to say that such people are actively oppressed, just somewhat disenfranchised. Lord knows that sexism ain't dead, but it's not a major problem, here and now, i.m.h.o.

This 'literary' crowd you speak of sounds more like a bunch of losers than serious artists. Such fools are better ignored than taken seriously. Ditto for Spitfire; Killer nailed it: their bumph is so over-the-top, it's obviously for shock and attention, and not worth getting pissed about.

Hey, here's a bit on spitfire that I'm not posting tonight. I have nine pieces and that's enough. If I start going over ten I obviously would have even less of a life than I realize..

http://outofambit.blogspot.com/2003_10_12_...#106620812074625569

Edited by author 10-16-2003 12:11 AM
It seems to me, from the readings provided by bookninja, that the gentlemen involved with the creation of the Spitfire publishing initiative are (or at least pretending to be) reactionary, chauvinist, nincompoops. And it's true, if they don't publish good books, then we will surely see the ass end of them in short order. For all their posturing in the media, it's going to come down to their front list as soon as they start publishing, and if they don't deliver adventure stories that people want to read, they will be dead in the water faster than you can say Clive Cussler.

As for the other contentious topics raised in this thread, I have to admit that The Fat Kid has said some things that hit close to home. I just refuse to buy into any ideology that professes that merely being born male carries with it some brand of sociological original sin. I’ve encountered, over the years, both from men and from women, the idea that being male in our society is something that must be perpetually atoned for. I can’t abide such nonsense. Just over eight months ago I became the father of a spectacular little boy. I have enough love in my heart not to have named him Claude, thus sparing him at least two decades of social torment, and so my wife and I decided to name him after her grandfather, Samuel, or Sam for short, which we think has a nice ring to it (we call him “Sam-for-short”). My point is, if anyone wants to label my beautiful son, Sam-for-short, ‘the hereditary villain of history’, they’re going to have to get through me first. And if they succeed in that, then they’re going to have to get through my wife, and if it should ever come to that, may God have mercy on their souls.

Edited by author 10-16-2003 12:51 AM
My point is not that we are, or should feel, guilty for things past, but rather things current. All I want people to realize is that participation in this whole thing is mandatory and not necessarily voluntary. My form of fighting it is to point it out when I see it. In myself and others.

Listen, this will be my last post on this, but I do want to note one thing: Z, FK, Killer, (presumably) Claude -- we, as white, middle-classish, straight men, are the only people in western society for whom walking out the front door is not an inherently political act. We walk out into the street and we are not considered out of place, we are not considered goods for possible consumption, we are not considered deviant in any way. Even the fat and red-headed among us. We don't have to think about it as anything other than toodling out the door.

We can go about our day without worrying whether the people in the ATM line think we're going to rob them, whether we're dressed too provacatively, whether we'll wander into a gaggle of frat boys and get beaten up. I'm not saying that any of you have or have not committed egregious human rights violations (tho, Killer, that IS an interesting choice of pseudonym....:), or that you are responsible for the sins of (y)our fathers, but rather that we, men (and women), are responsible for acknowledging existing inequities, in whatever remnant form they may occur, and doing whatever is in our power to cancel them out. (Without trying to slide into hyperbole) the same way liberal Germans are hyper-sensitive to allegation of anti-semitism, or the way some white Americans are striving to make social reparations to blacks through increased study and awareness of black issues and challenges, we need to be aware of where we participate in these structures.

There's no denying that FK's prof was a moron. Moronosity knows no gender bounds. But I made all the same arguments you've made years ago. Biology, unfair advantages, reverse bigotry -- but in my experience, the more you talk this out to its logical conclusion, the more you realize it is still a current problem that needs addressing. It's hard to admit this and feel self-worth. But as you say, I don't feel as tho I've done anything wrong. Not personally. But that doesn't negate the fact that I reap the rewards of being society's main desirable, does it? Nor do I really do anything to change things. My wife (sorry, partner:) and I live a life that, to some, radically redefines traditional gender roles, but things aren't that different from our parents' time. We strive to raise our boy outside gender-coded scripts, etc., but, damn, the kid wears a lot of blue. Is he a worthless mysogynist pig? No. Could he be? Could any of us be, unchecked?

That's all I'm asking, is that we stop and check every now and then, and realize that the situation isn't fixed, or near being fixed. We may be working towards constructing a better future, but it's a union job and people are lazy. To extend the metaphor to nigh breaking: be a foreman instead of a drone on this job. (Ah, not nigh -- well past snapped... sigh)

P.S. Claude and Sam are both great names. I was a red-headed, heavily-freckled, bespectacled, skinny-then-suddenly-fat, enrichment bookworm named George.

Does it get any worse than that for social torment? I would have beat myself up if I'd been able to take me.

Edited by author 10-16-2003 03:19 AM
George, thanks for saying what you've been saying in this thread.

If ya'll indulge me being meta for a moment, I LOVE how much respect I see in our little booknija world. Even when people are violently disagreeing I notice a genuine effort to understand what others are trying to communicate and a desire to engage in an honest and productive way. It pleases me. Thanks.

(I'm done being sappy now. You may go about your business as usual.)

Late night baby feeding turns to late night ninjasizing:

Claude is a good name, sure. Size eight shoes are good shoes, too. If your feet are a size eight. I was a rare thing growing up in Montreal. A poor brown Anglo (so, no, Bookninja, I'm not white, but it was as good a guess as any, I suppose). My parents were allophones (My father is Roma, and my mother is Indian, i.e. from India) who came to Canada because neither of their families supported their marraige, but that's a entirely different kettle of fish, suffice to say white people haven't cornered the market on racism, so you can stop feeling guilty about that, too. They first lived in English Canada (Hamilton) before eventually settling in Quebec for employment reasons. They never fit in here in Montreal, so they named me Claude in the hopes it would at least help me fit in with the locals. And did it ever work!

No. It didn't.

I don't know if I can beat Bookninja on the social torment meter, but I'll bet I can match it. Try this: I was a poor brown Anglo with a "faux" French name growing up in a city where most of the Anglos are white and rich, with a "Gypsy" for a father and a "Paki" for a mother, coke-bottle glasses and incredibly skinny, and here's the cherry: I had a wicked stutter. I tell you, somedays I might as well have been green, because it wasn't easy.

How about you Fat Kid? Judging from your name I'll bet you have a story. If it's too personal, forget I asked. I have a bad habit of being too familiar sometimes, and the facelessness of the internet makes it so easy.

PS. Don't feel bad for me, though. I'm still skinny, but advancements lens technology have gotten rid of the coke bottles. The stutter's gone. I've made some good friends in Montreal despite it all. I have a nice job. I have beautiful wife and son, and my loving parents are still alive to enjoy being loving grandparents. Life couldn't be better. Well, maybe if I had season's tickets for the Habs...

Ninja say: "We may be working towards constructing a better future."

Ah, Ninja, you are a Romantic, after all.

Have you read much Isaiah Berlin?

I too am intrigued that the ninja would assume that I am white, and that I am a man. He's made me suddenly super-conscious of the unintentional signals I am sending through word choice and sentence structure. Is it possible other people in my life think I'm a white man, and judge me for that? Would readers of my writing know "what" I am just by my predisposition to the adverb "non-chalantly?" Here we back into a discussion of voice and appropriation, only from the other side. Fascinating.

By which I mean, ninja, of course I accept the spirit of what you so eloquently assert, but where do you live -- Guelph? Here in the heart of... let's just say a large multi-ethnic urban centre, I can't walk out my door without feeling judged for who I am, or threatened in one way or another because of what I look like. The other day, I woke up to find someone had spray-painted the words "Yuppies Out!" on my neighbours' garage. Why? Because the group of houses we live in were built last year, while the surrounding houses in the neighbourhood are about 80 years old.

Because the hatred and intolerance is directed at the perception of wealth and privilege -- my neighbours being a young couple of lawyers, one of Asian and one of African descent -- and not at race or gender, is that better or worse, historically speaking?

At first I thought it said "Puppies Out!," so I figured it had nothing to do with me. Why do the intolerant have such bad handwriting?

It's all so complicated, yes? That's why I try to look past the situation (still a problem, not a problem) at the cause (ignorance, greed, envy, intolerance) and aim my darts there. When I witness others aiming their darts at the situation, with little regard for the cause, I tend to sigh and shake my head.

That said, I was extremely sympathetic to Claude until he revealed himself for the filthy, smelly Habs-fan that he is. Habs suck! Go... a team from some other large multi-ethnic urban centre... Go!

Killer, would anyone other than a white male write "the filthy, smelly Habs-fan that he is. Habs suck! Go... a team from some other large multi-ethnic urban centre... Go!"?

I can always hope so, but I continue to think not. :)

No, not too personal, Claude. My childhood is very close to public domain at this point, as I've more or less written two books about it (although my next will be nothing of the sort, I PROMISE). Claude, I really don't think this compare's with your story in the least (Have you ever thought of writing a novel? You could be the Roma-Indian Richler!) Okay, long story short: Nice family. Grew up overweight and clinically depressed in a hick town. Boys were violent. Got beat up a lot. Girls were cruel. Got beat down a lot. The first time I ever asked a girl out she screamed and wept openly. The sky became as black as sackcloth and the moon became as blood. Subsequently, I struggled with body image and eating disorder problems for years.

But I'm feeling MUCH better now. It's all in the book, but it would be crass to plug it here, right?

Janine, I suppose you're right. I am the poetry editor for a press. And I did run a well-known reading series for five years. But in Canada, isn't being kinda powerful for a poet a little like being kinda tall for a midget?

Edited by author 10-16-2003 11:21 AM
No Isaiah Berlin, Bryson; should I?

P.S. What kind of a pseudonym is "Bryson, M?" Are you a man or a woman? A one-eyed, black, lesbian veteren with a pechant for cigarellos and culottes? You people are all so strange in the names you choose.... It confounds me so.

Janine, I am extremely pleased with how things are working out here, as is Crouching Ninja. We've got a smart, sensitive, articulate group. I love it.

FK, just for the record, I think it was Twinkle who called you powerful, though of course I too am awed by your presence. Just too shy to a say it.

While we're on the topic of internet identies, naming and assumptions, I have to admit there was a small blush on my cheek when I realized that because of Claude's hyphenated last name, I had assumed he was a woman. Which obviously is not the case.

I don't *like* it, but I seem to have a default setting for 'anonymous' internet entities. I tend to assume whiteness and maleness unless I have reason to believe otherwise. It's funny the things that do it; a hyphenated last name had me picturing Claude in a skirt, so to speak. I will admit that to me 'killer' sounds like a name a man would choose. I imagine 'Twinkle' is a woman (which is one of the reasons that FK may have confused us).

Janine, Twinkle, I'm sorry for confusing the two of you. I should have scrolled down to double check who had said what.

I think it's interesting that we (I did as well) assumed Claude is white. Why did we? Janine, I think its just plain weird that you thought he was a woman...named Claude. And he's not the first Claude to have a hyphenated name. There's Claude Levi-Straus, the critic. And then there's Jean-Claude Van Damme.

Claude, how do you pronounce your name? Does it rhyme with "sod", or with "glowed"?

Now the name looks kinda Gaelic, don't it?

Ah, Ninja. Should you? I don't like to push books on people, but maybe I can give a hint of why this discussion brought Berlin came to mind.

If you'll pardon me quoting myself (in a review from TDR):

"In his introduction to Berlin's collection _Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas_, Roger Hausheer summarizes Berlin's point of view:

>>>The core of his outlook is the belief that the perennial, basic human problems are not soluble at all; that men can only do their best in the situation in which they find themselves, with no a priori guarantee of ultimate success; that men are themselves changed by the efforts they make to solve the problems of their age or culture, thereby creating new men and new problems; and that therefore the future problems and needs of men, and their solution and satisfaction, cannot in principle be anticipated, still less provided for in advance; finally, that an indissoluble part of the definition of human nature consists in a cluster of concepts like free-will, choice, purpose, effort, struggle, entailing as they do the opening up of new and unpredictable paths to human fulfillment.<<<

"The non-gender-neutral language in the above paragraph is, of course, a reminder that Berlin predated the two or three waves of feminism which have passed through the decades since the late-1960s. Berlin's thoughts, however, are useful for explaining both the successes and failures of that movement. Berlin saw that abstractions like freedom, peace and justice often worked at cross-purposes in the real world. Ideologues believe abstractions can be imposed upon history."

So, I wouldn't say you _should_ read Berlin, but I would encourage anyone to have an encounter with his POV; well expressed, I thought, in his book of essays RUSSIAN THINKERS, but Michael I. does a decent job in the bio that was the subject of the above review.

When I read some Berlin, well after my undergraduate days, I had one of those a-ha moments: "Here's someone who says something I wish I had heard before." It sounded like home. It sounded true. I'd summarize Berlin's view to be that all ideologies are (ultimately) false because their own goals are incompatible; can we have both "freedom" and "equality" at the same time? The concepts have limits; they also compete.

Berlin was born in Russia just before the 1918 Revolution, and his critique of liberation movements is grounded in that experience. But he was also a philosopher who traced the use, power, meaning of concepts through history. In the my post, I flippantly called you a Romantic; sorry for the over-simplification. It's one of my pet projects: critiquing Romanticism (a la Bellow's HERZOG -- a joke, but not just).

I mean, yes, make the world a better place -- but problematize that phrase, too. (Problematize: a word I picked up at U of T. Sometimes it comes in handy!)

Before I have my say (again), I'd just like to re-iterate what Janine and Bookninja have said about this assemblage of characters. I think it's a very cool forum of smart funny yet serious folk and I haven't had such enjoyable discussions since I quit university cold-turkey.

Re: stepping out the door, Killer's right, George. This feeling of invulnerability or obliviousness, or what have you, is totally dependent on context. I've lived in at least three different places where I have not had the luxury of such unawareness. While living up north, I was actually part of a visible, yet domninant, minority whose presence is still very much resented by the aboriginal populace. And they let you know it, too. I can't count the number of times I was called 'qallunaaq' (a not-complimentary Inuktitut term for non-Inuit), 'white boy'or 'white trash'; sometimes more or less affectionately, but often by people I didn't even know. And at work, it was another matter. I have opted, for various reasons too complicated to go into here, to work in 'unskilled' manual labour. Try being honest about your background, about being the son of a deputy minister, about going to a private high school and then university, try saying your grandfather was Jewish and a doctor, try this when you're working with people from poor rural communities who are doing the same job because they bloody well have to in order to feed their kids, and tell me setting foot outside your staff house in the welfare ghetto isn't a political act. George, you've seen my MS; I didn't choose the title or the epigraph from Exodus to be clever, I chose them because they're true.

In Montreal, where I lived for nearly three years, I couldn't walk around in public without the awareness that I'm not a francophone. I'm an anglo who happens to be very fluent in french, but that doesn't count. I'd speak French to clerks in stores, waiters, etc., but as soon as a hint of English accent is detected, most would switch to my language. (Most of the completely French exchanges I had were with other anglos, funnily enough.) Far from making me more comfortable, this only highlighted my 'otherness', to employ a much overused piece of jargon. Montreal, as I'm sure Claude can testify, is far more cosmopolitan than the rest of Quebec, so imagine what it must be like for an anglo in, say, Rouyn-Noranda or the Gaspé.

And now, as I have in the past, I'm living in Halifax's North End. I'm sure most of you know the history of black/white problems in this city, the evacuation and bulldozing of Africville and its aftermath. Well, this is where Africville's residents were put when their homes were destroyed by the government. I can't walk down Gottingen or Creighton St. without a hyper-awareness that I'm white and don't live in public housing. It is a political decision for me to go down Gottingen instead of the less-sketchy Agricola when I leave my apartment on foot--especially at night. The only person I actually know to have been randomly assaulted in this neighbourhood was a white man. He was a red-head, though...

Maybe it was just unfortunate phrasing, but it sounds, George, as though you're saying that we should all feel guilty about things present. Well, I'm with Claude on this when he says it's nonsense. I don't think it's ever productive or forward-thinking to indulge in neurotic emotions like guilt. Guilt is a great paralyzer, and what we need is action, not introspection, if we're gonna move forward. This doesn't mean pretending everything's hunky-dory, it just means that things have never been hunky-dory and never will be, so let's get on with it shall we and not wallow in an orgy of guilt and recrimination. I think everyone present is aware of the problems, so we don't need constant reminding. It's like correcting people's grammar obsessively (a bad habit of mine until recently); all it does is sidetrack potentially fruitful talk into realms of tangential irrelevance.

Claude, it sounds like Sam-for-short's got a bright future.

Michael,

It all comes down to the will to power :)

FK,

Obviously my unconscious assumption that hyphenated surnames usually belong to women outweighed my need to identify a male-sounding name with a man. And, to be honest, I think I was reading 'Claudia' because it fit better with my assumption.

You're right that men do sometimes have hyphentated names, but it's been my observation that many women hyphenate when they marry but their husbands rarely make any changes to their own surnames.

The other thing that made it possible for me to slide Claude into the 'female' slot is that until we started identifying our categories he hadn't said anything that struck me as being particularly male. Z, on the other hand, always sounded like a man to me. But I wonder what I would have thought if he called himself Nancy. I don't know.

As for assumptions of whiteness, it's part of our white privilge. We get to choose whether or not to bother thinking about race. Sometimes we pretend that's a good thing, and call ourselves 'colourblind', which really means "can't be bothered to try to understand difference, thanks, so I'll pretend (and maybe even try) to treat everyone like they are white and that'll mean I'm not racist, right?"

I grew up just outside of London ON and just about everyone around me was white and Christian. I was indoctrinated to not see difference and to assume other people were like me. The world around me reflected myself back to me. (Or a masculine view of me, but I was a tomboy and didn't find drag troubling at the time) Even though I have had the opportunity to understand the world differently since then I still have to be vigilant about questioning my default assumptions about the world. Old habits die hard.

When I was at teacher's college in London a few years ago I looked around the lecture hall in one of our really big classes one day in mid October and realized how white the group was. I commented on this to a friend who is not white. She laughed and laughed because of course she had been aware of it since the first day. I had the luxury of not even considering it.

It's interesting to observe how that has changed for me since I've been in Vancouver. I was housesitting for a friend in Kits this spring and took the bus downtown. Normally I'm coming from East Van. It kinda freaked me out to be surrounded by so many white people. I've gotten used to the diversity of Vancouver, and I'm usually the visible minority on my bus ride to work and that now feels normal for me. However, this thread has reminded me that the part of my brain that deals with 'generic' humanness still whitewashes the image. Damn, that pisses me off!

Edited by author 10-16-2003 04:20 PM
My god, Z! Ayn Rand has highjacked my website! More later when my boy isn't wailing and smashing at the keyboard.

Edited by author 10-16-2003 05:00 PM
I pronounce my name the Anglo way, so that it rhymes with "sod". It's actually a Roma tradition to adopt names from the dominant culture that surrounds you, so it made sense to my father to give me a French-Canadian name. My mother considered giving me a traditional, old-fashioned Indian name, like Acharyanandana or Manibhushan or Jyotiprakash, but in the end I was Claude, so in hindsight, maybe it's not so bad.

Janine, your choice of words, "to slide Claude into the 'female' slot" is very Freudian. I don't know what to make of it, but just so you know, I'm happily married, thanks. :)

My last name, on both side's of the hypen, is my father's. No one's really sure what it means or where it comes from. My father believes one of our ancestors just made it up when the need to have a last name presented itself, designed to sound kind of indescriminately European, so that it would sound natural no matter where he travelled. I'm not sure if it works on that level, but there it is. There's a strange anxiety among the Roma to blend in with surrounding cultures, but also to remain insular and fiercly traditional. Something I began to understand given the way diffenent ethnicities relate to one another in Montreal.

Going back to original thrust of this thread, being Chick Lit, and in light of all the multi-cultural talk being bandied about, I thought it might interesting to point out that most of what I'm familiar with as "chick lit" revolves around middle- or upper-middle class white women who are just trying to "make it after all" (to borrow a phrase from Mary Tyler Moore), while at the same time trying to finally land that slightly wealthier, slightly more powerful, slightly better-looking man. Does anyone else find this trend, the message these narratives deliver, somewhat disturbing?

Maybe it's suburban priviledge. Me, I'm white. Grew up in Toronto. When my father went to ask my elementary school principal if the school had French immersion, he was told: "Mr. Bryson, we have a hard enough time teaching the kids English." Students at my school came from 77 different nations. When I went to Waterloo for university, I immediately noticed how white the campus was (found it freaky); when I lived in Saskatoon later, I was shocked by how rampant the racism was, how polarized the community. Goodie for me. Gold star. So what?

Um, a literary question. Has anyone captured this multiplicity of otherness(es) that is the Canadian urban multicultural reality? Seems to me we get books written out of a variety of ethnic perspectives, but none so far that work multi-culturally.... though WHITE TEETH by Zadie Smith was pretty good at that (though not Canadian).

Edited by author 10-16-2003 05:18 PM
Claude,

What you say about Chick Lit is very interesting. I know Peter Darbyshire (Vancouver ninja) used to be a proofreader for a large, Toronto-based publisher of pulp romance novels that shall remain nameless, but suffice to say it rhymes with an Irish girl I used to have a crush on, "Carly Quinn".

I remember Peter pointing out roughly the same pattern in Harlequin novels (ooops, okay, the cat's out of the bag). That the women were usually white, middle-class or upper-middle-class women i.s.o. a man who is wealthier, more successful, and generally better-looking than they are. (Peter, correct me if I'm wrong or missing anything here.) It seems to reinforce all sorts of unfortunate stereotypes about "gold-diggers" or "cinderellas" waiting to be rescued from their lives instead truly empowering themselves through their own actions. If all this is true, then what, aside from packaging, distinguishes the average Chick Lit title from the average trashy romance novel?

George, what was that about Ayn Rand?

I should point out that the description of "women" below refer to characters in Harlequin novels, not necessarily the employees of Harlequin Publishing...necessarily.

Re Harlequin women (fictional characters, not the women I worked with):

Yeah, the women in Harlequin books are generally middle class and occasionally even upper class. Their romantic quests are less about them being rescued by richer men (although rescue often plays a role, especially in the historicals), and more about just seeking fulfillment (with richer men). A constant theme is that a successful career isn't just enough on its own. I think that's actually fine, as it's true enough we all need more than just a good job and lots of money, but what I sometimes found disturbing about the books was the complete abdication of social empowerment once the woman found the man. The Christian line was particularly unsettling to me -- you'd have women quitting their jobs because women working was the real problem with society (according to the books), and women praying for forgiveness for having worked in the first place. I published a piece in the Journal of Popular Culture about the line, talking about how Christian just meant anti-feminist in this context.
I would draw a distinction between the Christian books and the other Harlequins though. Many Harlequin authors claim their books are actually feminist, and there is an interesting argument to be made (in a nutshell: women "tame" the alpha males of society and force them into a more egalitarian relationship in which the men recognize the women's needs and accomodate them, and man and woman share power albeit in different spheres, such as work and domestic). It's a tricky argument, but it's easier to see if you move outside of the realm of university-educated young women and into Harlequin's traditional readership: middle-aged women in longer relationships. There's been a couple of books written on the subject: Reading the Romance and Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women. Maybe I'll post my piece sometime if I ever get another scanner.

As for the gold-digging and all that: what's interesting about the books is that the men are always wealthy, either financially or rich in land, but that the trappings of wealth don't usually mean much in the books. They're really just signifiers of power. So a rich man is a powerful man (alpha male) and thus a good man. Very Horatio Alger, in a way.

That said, I argued in another piece I published on Harlequin that the middle-class jobs and rich men of the books mean something completely different to Eastern European and Russian readers, where Harlequin is expanding into. For readers of emerging capitalist nations, Harlequins are really romantic fantasies of capitalist success. You can read my old and naive essay on it here, if you like:

http://www.middleenglish.org/spc/spcissues/23.1/darbyshire.htm

All right, back to treading water.

Silly Ninja, Ayn Rand just hijacked the will to power for evil purposes.

Wow, you people sure did a lot of gabbing while I was on the road! I'll never catch up. And this hotel keeps disconnecting me. Err.
Yep, I'm a girl twinkle.

Thanks Peter, though I wonder if your post doesn't raise more questions than it answers. I also wonder if you, in particular, having invested some time into the subject, have some insight on the other question I asked, based on Claude's observations, being: What, aside from packaging, distinuishes the typical Chick Lit title (say Bridget Jones) from the average Harlequin romance (say The Millionaire and the Mommy)? If it all comes down to seeking fulfillment with a rich and/or powerful man, are they basically the same kind of narrative, and/or reinforcing the same old sociological myths?

And sociologically speaking, what are the implications of such narratives? That a rich/powerful man equals a "good" man? Does it follow that a poor and/or disenfranchised man is automatically somehow "bad". Given the connections made, even within this discussion thread, between race and class and socio-economic standing, does it follow that such narratives are necessarily racist and/or prejudiced in some way?

Claude, as someone less likely, if precidence is to be taken into account, to be cast as the male lead in such a narrative, I wonder if you feel more strongly that some kind of inherent racism/classism exists here. Or, is this question simply too obvious or silly to even be asked?

This just keeps going, doesn't it? I see Ninja simpering in the corner -- move on people, move on -- talk about Sylvia and Ted...

... and I will, but not now.

Fat KiDarby -- but where does that model leave the very first Harlequin Romance book, Wuthering Heights? Heathcliff is neither the richer nor the whiter of (K?)Catherine's choices, yet he wins all the little girls' hearts, and some of the little boyzes as well. He even wins, posthumously, Catherine's mouldy heart. One could argue that the vast ocean of crap that has come in the genre since WH outweighs the power of this original statement on EB's part, but I would doubt it. That book still has a formative influence on many, many youngens in the social construct department. And, maybe darby covered this in his essay (it's printed out, but as yet unread), isn't there a subversive undercurrent of heathcliffism in most harlequin adventures?

And to address the virulent anti-Christian atmosphere of this chat, I'd like to point out an excellent new poem by a young, little known, obviously Christian, poet, who addresses the strain upon his accepted religion of living in a society that runs from deeper insights:

http://www.taddlecreekmag.com/take_1_tablets.shtml

Catherine dies? Thanks for spoiling it for me, Killer.

Simpering? You guys are so mean.

:) .|..

Obviously, I meant whimpering. you see the s on the keyboard is just below the w... and the h... okay, I chose the wrong word. Cue me.

"Why are the men in the latest Canadian novels such wimps?"

Today's Toronto Star promotes Philip Marchands report on the above question, to be run in tomorrow's paper.

The headline (A2, Oct. 17): CANLIT WUSSES OUT: "Duddy Kravitz was an ambitious scrapper. Robertson Davies' protagonists endured hardship with grace and fortitude. Even the poetic creations of Michael Ondaatje kicked butt from time to time. So why are the men in the latest Canadian novels such wimps?"

Tune in tomorrow for the answer.

I think there IS a disturbing trend with chick lit. I thought Bridget Jones' diary was actually a pretty intelligent witty rewrite of Pride and Prejudice, and Bridget herself seemed pretty smart. I didn't find it all that vacuous (ok, a bit, but in a fun way, especially if you're bored on a plane)though certainly the movie was and all the imitators seem to be. But yes, it did make books about incompetent women pining after rich, good looking guys suddenly very trendy.

Despite Wuthering Heights being the supposed model for romance novels, it is really very different. Susan Meyer has an excellent chapter in her book "Imperialism at Home" about Heathcliff. She argues, quite persuasively, that his actions are that of the dark colonized rising up against the oppressors (he's found in Liverpool, at the height of the slave trade, others speculate he's either Indian or Roma, etc - in any event - he's a person of colour). Wuthering Heights is one of my favorite books ever, and the love story is really only a small part of it. It's about social climbing and revenge and racism and yes, sexism. (Shit, I'm outing myself as a nerd.) Anyway, suffice to say, the romance novels that have used Wuthering Heights as a model have taken away much of the complexity of the original book, and made it into dreck instead.

I can't get over how badly written romance novels are. I was reading one on a work break the other day, and the guy went down on the woman and then shortly after, she was still shaking as a result of coming "face to face with her own womanhood". I guess that's one more thing you can say about romance novels - the women are pretty damn athetic!

Thanks for the link, Killer. Definitely an excellent poem. Good of you to share it with the group. And who's that poet? Have to look for more by him. Not convinced about the poem having a christian message, though.

True, Madeleine, Wuthering Heights is about as closely related to today's Harlequin novels as Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" is related that old seasonal favourite "Mary-Kate and Ashley Get EVERYTHING for Christmas."

Bronte's novel also has an extremely elaborate system of exposition. Layers of narrators who can't be trusted to be telling the truth or to remember the details correctly. Much of the dark, melodrama of the novel can be read as the result of exageration by the narrators. Something tells me the Harlequin hasn't been written that's that smart about story-telling.

Madeleine wrote: "But yes, it did make books about incompetent women pining after rich, good looking guys suddenly very trendy."

Come now, this only happens in books? I’ve heard the women in my office talking in the lunch room. They seem awfully preoccupied with a man’s wealth, when the subject comes up.

There is all manner of more-or-less innocuous but nonetheless not-to-be-admired behaviours that people indulge in that our present popular-culture is always seeking to excuse rather than to criticize. From Bridget Jones to Pretty Woman, women are being sold a bill of goods that says, “It doesn’t matter if you’re incompetent, and heck, it doesn’t even matter if you’re a self-compromising whore, not only is a wealthy, conventionally handsome man your only shot at personal fulfillment, you’re entitled to it.” It terms of individual empowerment, it’s dangerously close to Cinderella, who’s powerless to rise above her miserable lot without the help a magic and a love-struck prince who wants to give her everything. The formula seems to be this, if you are merely pretty, then this fact alone means all your wishes should be granted.

Doesn’t this fly in the face of decades of feminist thought and action? In a way, don’t these narratives reinforce the old-fashion notion that Hubby is the real bread-winner, that women can have their “cute little occupations” as long as they have a “real man” to buy them jewellery and take care of the bills? Or that a person’s value is directly proportional their sexual desirability?

Sure, FK, I’m constantly aware of the racial implications of “leading men” in books, movies, on television, etc., but also of “leading women.” The beauty myth includes race and class across the board. Though there does seem to be a gender inequity in these narratives. I don’t see too many stories about a poor man who catches the eye of a beautiful, wealthy woman, and who is, in turn, elevated by her above his station in the name of romance. When it does happen, it’s usually a Cinderfella-type farce, as though it’s utterly laughable that a beautiful woman of privilege would waste her indulgences so clearly “below her”. Why is that, I wonder?

Well, of course Harlequin's are not as sophisticated as WH, and I hope my comments on that novel were not taken as dismissive. Dostoevsky and Poe inform all detective fiction, but hardly any modern day blood spatterers have as much literary merit. I merely meant to point out that sweeping generalizations about what Harlequins "do" for social structures may be inaccurate due to subversive rumblings at the source. On the other hand, I refuse to try and prove this by actually reading a Harlequin.

Ninja, Catherine does die, sorry to say, but in WH2: Revenge of the Socially Misguided, it is revealed she was merely sleeping, and her sword doth smite all the pasty residents of Yorkshire once and for all.

Claude, indeed these female to male inversions do exists, and are in fact almost always dealt with in a more complex, realistic and interesting way.

I'm thinking of Far From Heaven, in which the beautiful and rich, very white fifties housewife, play by Julianne Moore (rrrrr) in the film, risks all (and loses much of same) to A: accept in the most decent manner possible that her husband is a homosexual and B: take an extreme social and indeed physical risk in exploring romantic feelings for a black man. Her object of romance is not "elevated" by her, but rather self-elevated by his own intelligence, sensitivity and desire for a better world for his daughter.

Then there is the King of the Hill episode in which the gormless and unattractive neighbour Bill is romanced by the former Governor of Texas, Anne Richards, see link below for glamour shot and hilarious message beneath her photo:

http://www.cemetery.state.tx.us/pub/user_f...step=1&pers_id=3167

What does it say about the world that these romances never seem to gel, despite everyone's best intentions?

Good question, Claude, why is that, indeed? I wish it weren't so, since work is the last thing I want to waste my life on. SWM in search of sugar-mommy, age and appearance irrelevant, great wealth mandatory.

Seriously, tho, one more often sees the young-poor-man-with-older/richer-woman scenario played out with the man being a sort of emasculated gigolo, like in Sunset Boulevard (I realize this is a gross simplification of an amazing film, but...). Why this is, is simply because such story lines run against the grain of the masculine mythos, ja? Such stories reflect the anxiety many men seem to feel about being usurped by a new kind of powerful woman.

Killer, I guess the question is, why is the chick-lit pattern comedy, whereas the Far From Heaven model is inevitably tragic?

I don't have any real solid thoughts on this, but tentatively I'd say that men, by and large and for whatever sociological/biological complex of reasons, refuse to be dependent on women, or on anyone else for that matter. In spite of what I jokingly said in my last post, I simply can't imagine depending on a patroness and just staying at home and writing. I don't think I could handle even a more egalitarian distribution of labour, if it involved me not earning income. I'm down with being a house-husband in theory, but I know that I couldn't handle it for long in practice. Maybe this is just me, but I think it's a basic element of what we call masculinity.

I'm not sure refusal to be dependant accounts for the tragic endings of two more examples I've thought of: Titanic (tragedy due to bloody great shipwreck), and Howard's End (tragedy due to bloody great falling bookcase), but obviously something is going on here.

Killer, this is probably pedantic, but I think you might be conflating "tragic" with "catastrophic"--tho the demise of the Titanic definitely had something to do with the hubris of its creators, owners and operators. Howard's End--it's been to long for me to say anything.

I sure would like to hear from some of the ladies on how they feel about the prevelence of Cinderella narravtives in what's marketed as women's entertainment/literature..., Maid in Manhattan, You've Got Mail, Pretty Woman, Bridget Jones, et al.

The 'ladies,' Claude? How gauche :)

Not necessarily gauche, Z. There are still parts of the world where the word "lady" is used respectfully. I'll assume Claude meant it that way. Besides, sometimes its too hard to wade through which words the language police like this week, and which words are back in favour, and which were in favour last week but have since lapsed into taboo. I know someone who only uses the phrase "people of colour" and refuses to be specific (black, hispanic, asian, etc.), which is perhaps done with the best of intentions, but in effect denies people the validity of their race and heritage. Thing is, you can't please everyone.

What do you ladies think about this? Or, better yet, leave this discussion where it belongs (in 1992), and talk about Cinderella stories. Like Claude, I'm curious for your feedback.

Edited by author 10-17-2003 06:11 PM
A few quick thoughts.

"Ladies": For whatever reason, I took no offense to it when Claude used it. There are times when the word worries me - "SWM looking for a lady to share romantic dinners and quiet times" Ugh! A <cough> friend of mine has seen ads like that when perusing personals, and she tells me it creeps her out.


Cinderella narratives: The examples Claude listed mostly make me roll my eyes in disgust or despair. But if I'm really *really* honest with myself, the context of my initial viewing has a huge impact on how I feel. I have a secret soft spot for Pretty Woman because I was young when I first saw it and my current horror at the message of the movie is mitigated by the nostalgic attachment to a younger Janine. I'm also aware that there are Cinderella narrative movies and books that I am fond of. I KNOW there are because I watch/read them, enjoy them, then HATE myself for it. But I can't think of an example off the top of my head. I'll think on it for you.

No poor guy/ rich woman stories with happy endings: I don't think there's much of a market for it. The narratives we're talking about aren't for men. They're for women who want an escape from their dreary lives, who have a sense of powerlessness in their own lives which is what attracts them to these narratives in the first place. They want to identify with the protagonist who goes through a change in circumstance without having to find power for herself or by herself. Identification with the protagonist becomes complicated for women readers/viewers in the poor guy/rich woman scenario because they have to choose between identifying with a woman they can't imagine being, or a man who occupies the social position they feel more kinship with. Women are asked to idenify with the male perspective all the time in art, and romance novels are an escape from that too. So reading a romance that confuses identifcation issues is just too much work. It's my guess that there's very little appeal for men in the rescue narrative. Men are able to rescue themselves. That's what most of the canon is about, isn't it? So who really wants to read about a man rising above his station through the love a driven, uncomproming woman who finally learns to open up as a result of his love and nurturing.?

Why, oh why can't I ever be brief? I have more to say, but I should actually work for the rest of my work day. More later.

Have to leap from the lurk to interject. Wouldn't the entire vibe of Pretty Woman be totally different if the movie started just five minutes earlier, showing Julia Roberts servicing some greasy John in an alley for 20 bucks, before Gere shows up in his limosuine to whisk her away to a life of luxury? Would we feel more sympathy for her, because of whatever circumstances led her to such self-debasemnet, or less sympathy, because such debasement is easier to overlook when we don't see it?

Gosh, I just KNEW there were lurkers out there. I think this is a very important point, X. When you come into a story makes so much difference, doesn't it? But would a movie like Pretty Woman or any Harlequin novel be our subject of discussion here if someone put enough thought in in the first place?

Somewhat off topic - who would have directed a Pretty Woman with the greasy alley scene? My vote is Godard.

Edited by author 10-17-2003 07:57 PM
oooh, I'm so intrigued by the difference the 5 minutes before makes.

I don't know who I'd pick for a director, but I wonder if the version of Pretty Woman that starts in the alley ends like Looking for Mr. Goodbar?

Edited by author 10-17-2003 08:14 PM
Geez, X. That's a dark notion, but one, I confess, that's crossed my mind before as well. It seems to me the movie (Pretty Woman) purposefully avoids dealing with the real issues involved with its protagonist. The story makes her a whore, but then fails to deal with the grim realities of the sex trade in a fair way. It's all glossed over and swept under the rug, polished up and served to us in a velvet box.

Perhaps Pretty Woman represents the genesis of the contemporary "Chick" genre, since so much of it seems to revolve around finding a wealthy man to take care of the protagonist (or at least the subgenre that includes the Cinderella narrative). Is the prostitute a more fitting archtype than we thought? Is it all about "going with men for money"?

Does our popular culture encourage a kind of social prostitution? Does it place a dollar figure on attraction? Does it encourage people to seek financial reward in exchange for their sexual desirability? What are the implications of this message being marketed to women? Is the very stuff of the comtemporary romantic fantasy something that relegates women to little more than symbolic prostitutes? I shudder to think.

As for who would direct such a version of Pretty Woman, I'd say Adrian Lyne.

If my memory serves me (after being served too many pints, sometimes now it does not), wasn't there a scene in Pretty Woman in which Roberts performs the role a little more realistically -- slipping below the field of view as Gere treats us to some of that impressive range of Buddhist blankness he passes off on the American public as acting? Wasn't that some sort of attempt to show a "reality?"

Of course, one would think that him paying for a hummer would have stacked the deck of love against him (it's the ace of loneliness for you, monk-boy!), but there was that snooty shopping trip on Rodeo to make up for it.

Some thoughts on Pretty Woman pointed out to me by my Very Clever Sister and verified on the Internet Movie Database
A) The original script was darker. It was bought by Disney who brought Frank Marshall in to direct it.
B) An early version of the script had Vivian addicted to cocaine; part of the deal was that she had to stay off it for a week. She needed the money to go to Disneyland. Edward eventually throws her out of his car and drives off. The movie was scripted to end with Vivian and her prostitute friend on the bus to Disneyland.
C) The working title was "3 Thousand" (thank you Internet Movie Database). That changes things a bit, doesn't it?
D) This is just plain fun to imagine – Molly Ringwald was offered the Roberts role and they considered Christopher Reeve for Gere's part.

The other thing Michelle mentioned was that the movie starts with Vivian waking up, looking for the rent money, and discovering that it's been used by her roomie for drugs. It's interesting that we were conflating the beginning of the movie with the place where the prince shows himself to the fair maiden.

Edited by author 10-17-2003 09:52 PM
And if my memory sevres, wasn't that shopping spree on Rodeo Drive the very point in the movie where the audience is supposed to "buy" that the relationship between Roberts and Gere is taking on a "deeper" significance. Nothing says true love like lavish mercantile abandon! It reminds of those DeBeers commercials in which the "wife" doesn't express any real affection for the "husband" until the diamond earrings make their appearance. Seriously, WTF?

Perhaps the question we should be asking is this: is our popular culture giving enough narratives in which someone's potential worth (say, as a romantic partner) is based on the content of his character and not the size of his...ahem...wallet?

For a long time our academic institutions have been aware of the detrimental effect that the media can have on body image, and how the fashion industry holds the average human up to unrealistic standards of beauty. How about unrealistic standards of financial success? What effect does this have on the self-image of the general public? I'm a single guy. Should I be worried? Who should I believe: the fashion magazines that tell me I'm doomed to be lonely because I'm slightly oerweight, or these films that tell me I'll never find anyone because I don't have a trust fund? (Not that I'm on the prowl for street-walkers....)

Obviously, I'm overstating my point slightly, but that's my point.

FK, why are we so often posting at the same time? Is it just that you're always posting, or is there some deeper connection, d'ya think?

Edited by author 10-17-2003 10:23 PM
I think it's interesting that it was Roberts' character's roommate who had the drug problem, not Roberts herself. What does this say about the Disneyfying of American morals? Is the implication that a drug addict is not worthy of the same kind of salvation that befalls Roberts' character? Is the movie saying, it's okay to whore yourself, as long as you escape it by landing a billionaire, but if you try to escape it with a little nose candy, then the six-foot mouse will just leave you on the street where you belong?

The opening scene of the movie shows us, briefly, the economic reality of the character, but still does a fair job of glossing over the way she copes with it.

I also don't think it matters what the script originally intended. Though it's interesting to note just how drastically it was cleaned-up. The final product is what's sold to the public. The changes that were made were made consciously, to deliver the messages approved by Disney. Also, the very fact the title of the movie was changed to “Pretty Woman” reinforces the rather unctuous notion that being pretty is all that matters, that even the most compromised woman is redeemable only if she measures up to Hollywood’s standards of beauty, and she shall be redeemed by large numbers of T-bills.

The message is perhaps an inversion, or perversion, of the old maxim that, “the love of money is the root of all evil.” The new message seems to be: “Wealth itself is redemptive.” Which also seems to be the message of Bridget Jones, and Maid in Manhattan, and the other narratives Claude mentioned.

Janine, I don't know why we seem to post at the same time. Do you have a theory of some larger significance? For myself, I'm not one for fate, but I'm a big believer in coincidence.

Ninja: There's definately sex in the movie, but it's DisneySex (TM). The whole thing is about as realistic as the sex my Barbies used to have. You know, come to think of it, my Barbies were mostly getting laid or going shopping to get ready for a date. Which pretty much sums up the plot of Pretty Woman.

FK: Prostitute is really the perfect archtype. If I can hope on my hobbyhorse for a moment, Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus is the perfect companion to this conversation. The book ends with a romantic union that comes about after the male protagonist has his masculinity deconstructed and remakes himself so he's the able to have a relationship with the "New Woman". The characters in the novel who most exemplify a feminized position are men, demonstrating that much of what we naturalize regarding gender is really constructed.

Most relevant to this part of the thread is that the protagonist has been brought up by prostitutes. The novel opens with Fevvers telling this to an interviewer and suggesting that he might not be allowed to print that information in his paper (the story takes place at the turn of the last century). The interviewer replies, "I myself have known some pretty decent whores, some danm fine women indeed, whom any man might have been proud to marry." To which her nurse Lizze answers "Mariage? Pah! . . . Out of the frying pan into the fire! What is marriage but prostitution to one man instead of many? No different! D'you think a decent whore'd be proud to marry you, young man?"

Prostitution is presented as the logical extension of male/female relationships as they currently exist, which make a lot of sense to me (no offence intended to either married people or prostitutes). The novel also spends a lot of time on the relationships among appearance, power, sex, money and gender. I liked the movie Eyes Wide Shut for that too - it really foregrounded that all these elements work together to create power, that it's not any one thing on its own.

In the context of the larger conversation, I have to point out that both narratives I just talked about mostly ignore race. Now, this thread is ostensibly about gender, but it worries me that race disappeared again.

I'd have to reread Bridget Jones again, but I don't remember there being that much focus on money. Yes, Mark Darcy was very wealthy (as well as handsome), and that was a plus, but I don't remember it being hammered home quite so much. But even if there were, I guess I'm ready to absolve Bridget Jones, because I found the parallels with Pride and Prejudice intelligent and just plain fun. Elizabeth Bennett was also much more attracted to Darcy after she saw his grounds and house. So, maybe not much has changed in the world (of literature or maybe otherwise). Maybe it would have been "better" if he wasn't rich, but then it wouldn't have been a remake of Austen's book, and I thought that was the whole point of it. And like Austen's book, it was very sardonic and fluffy (yes, I find Austen's books fluffy but that doesn't mean I don't still enjoy reading them). I guess what I'm getting at in my rambling way is that Fielding's novel was a) more intelligent than people give it credit for and b)was fun to read. It's not a book I eventually kept but who cares? Can't we just read some fun fluffy books sometimes without worrying about being contaminated by them because they are too lowbrow or potentially sexist, etc? Personally, I don't think that gives readers enough credit. I felt no need to rush out and find my own rich Mr. Darcy as a result of reading either book, and none of the people I know who read it felt that way either.

One more thought before I crash. We've been talking about the books for men - adventure books and so on - but unless I missed it, no one is really talking about the Bridget Jones equivilant for men - the Nick Hornby books. I've only seen the films, haven't read the books - any comments on them? What kind of messages, if any, are there about relationships? And did people really pick up on these messages at the time? Or did they just kick back and enjoy themselves? (Be honest).

Edited by author 10-17-2003 11:13 PM
Damn, if you guys can break a hundred posts by midnight (no double-dipping FK), I'll eat an entire jar of mayonaise.

Who am I kidding. I'll be back in a second... mmmm. What do you think, Joe?

FK - I have no theories. Coincidence is a fine explanation. It just means we end up leapfrogging back and forth to respond to each other.

I think it does matter what the script originally intended precisely because of how much it was cleaned up. The comparison both says a lot about the lure of the narratives we've been dicussing and also suggests that the producers of popular culture don't want to risk giving us other options.

Ninja
Will you post pictures?

Janine - your comments on romance novels: "The narratives we're talking about aren't for men. They're for women who want an escape from their dreary lives, who have a sense of powerlessness in their own lives which is what attracts them to these narratives in the first place."

Not too sure about this. I used to think this too - I remember how depressed I was when I stayed at someone's house (a small town Quebec/Vancouver exchange) and saw his mother and sister do all the housework - even to the point of cleaning the mens' bedroom, while the men sat in armchairs reading the paper, only moving to lift their feet up so the women could vacuum underneath. These women were constantly working, and the only time I ever saw them rest, was when they were reading romance novels. I also thought how depressing and dreary. But now I work at a daycare, and there's a bunch of romance novels there that people take home and read. I may not know all the staff intimately, but I certainly don't think that they feel they have dreary lives that they need to escape. They seem to be strong and strong-minded people and more or less happy in their lives, just as non-romance readers are more or less happy in their lives. I think the correlation between romance novels and miserable women is just too easy. What can we make of my addiction to trashy murder mysteries? Does that mean my life is dreary? Or does it just mean that sometimes our brains need to go on vacation for awhile and we want to read books that are "bad" for us. Literature, dahling, can be so very dull.

Madeline,
I think you're right that Bridgit Jones was not so focused on money, but I gave my copy away too, so I can't check. I had a love/hate relationship with the book. It was fun and fluffy, and some of her obsessiveness was amusingly familiar. But her obsessions with her weight and the wrong man, that wasn't a mirror I wanted to look into.

Alright, but remember when she lost all that weight and was so proud of herself and then went to a party and all her friends asked her if she'd been sick and how terrible she looked? And when she proudly told a friend how much weight she'd lost, he just said she looked better before and then she thought that her entire life had been a waste. I saw that as very critical of the whole obsession, not a celebration of it. Unfortunately, I don't remember that criticism following through in the rest of the book, but it was there (and wasn't at all in the movie, but that's another story.) I think we made it to the 100th mark!

Burp.

Edited by author 10-17-2003 11:32 PM
I think it's important to remember that it's a joke among graduate students that half of their bookshelves are lined with trashy to not-as-trashy murder mysteries. What is it with academics and pulp?

Can there be a link between what we see as escapism in mystery and what we see as escapism in romance? Is there another "brand" of people like academics who might read romance novels habitually? Maybe politicians? Dentists? Sanitation engineers?

(How was the mayo, George?)

Pride and Prejudice is certainly fluffy, but it's also a comedy of manners and is inextricably concerned with wealth and class. If Bridget Jones is meant to be a retelling of the Austen story, then it’s not by accident the object of dear Bridget’s affection is a wealthy man, though it should also be quite satirical concerning such attractions.

As for Jones losing all that weight and her friend telling her she looked better before… that is a good, positive message, and if the book doesn’t maintain it throughout then that’s a shame. I once lost a third of my body weight (about 70 lbs) in six weeks and was actually quite ill, but instead of being told I looked better before, I was congratulated and taken on a shopping trip for new clothes. So the messages we are fed in the media (in books, magazines, film and TV) are certainly reinforced in real life. No one noticed how ill I was, only that I looked more “acceptable”, and that was cause enough to celebrate.

Aren’t fashion magazines generally viewed as fluff?

Is fluffy escapism really that harmless?

Madeline, I agree with you that Fielding wasn't celebrating the neurosis of her protagonist. I was probably just being overly personal rather than keeping the proper academic distance. At the time I read the novel I had a problem with her weight issues because I can be like that. And I don't like it. I was pissed at her because I was pissed at me. Ditto the attraction to dastardly men. These are things I want to grow out of.

Escapism is harmful like the common cold is harmful, FK -- a generally mild virus that gets passed on and on but occasionally kills. How many kids had their potential cut off because they mistakenly viewed reading romance novels and Dean Koontz as big R reading? I know these people. They are my friends from high school. Guys in their 30's who read Dragonlance and Star Wars novels, but would describe themselves as "avid readers." No, you're an avid "buyer."

What I want to know is what's up with academics legitimizing what should be guilty secrets by teaching Master's seminars on the pulp they love?

Ninja, we must have gone to the same high school! And it was after midnight on the east coast when 100 popped up, if you're looking for a mayo loophole.

Madeline,

I had a response about the 'dreary' thing, but it got lost somewhere after 'submit message' and before landing.

Let me see if I can reconstruct it.

I take your point about the sterotype that 'dreary' calls up. I didn't mean 'dreary' to be syonymous with 'miserable' though, I was thinking more of boring and predictable. And I do think that people turn to genre fiction of all kinds because there's a comfort in the predictable narrative arc and resolution.

My life is often dreary, though I'm only miserable sometimes (the weather in Vancouver right now is enough to make anyone very miserable) but I prefer mysteries for my prozak. One of my best friends is a romance fan, and she's intelligent and independant and all those 'good' things. I don't think less of her because she likes romance novels. I just can't stomach them myself. I've tried, but the gender politics gives me the heebie-jeebies.

Ninja - I think that escapism is probably the common draw of different types of genre fiction. I'm curious about what anxieties about the world we're exploring/exorcising with our choices. The current issue of the Georgia Straight has an article abour Spider Robinson. He observes:
"You know, 15 minutes after 9/11, the science-fiction fans in the audience were already thinking out the fourth- and fifth-order implications. We're thinking about 12 moves down the line because that's what we do. Everybody else is all flustered about cloning; we'd dealt with cloning back about the mid-'70s. Science fiction is inoculation against future shock."
http://www.straight.com/?defaultarticle=17...ction=Load%20Layout

So what makes us choose the escape we do? Is it gender, class, race, childhood trauma? Whatever was laying around the house when we were kids?

I had already eaten it back around post 52. Pictures tomorrow.

Well, there's different kinds of escapism, there's Treasure Island, and then there's Disney's Treasure Island. You know?

I don't want to take credit away from "the reader", but the models for success and happiness we receive from "fluff" do have an effect on the way we develop and live in the world.

Little girls (and little boys, it turns out) learn to hate their bodies because of "fluffy" fashion iconography.

Fluffy romances teach people to expect that the ideal mate is unrealistically beautiful, or wealthy, or both.

These models, when a small group of thinky people dissect them in some shadowy corner of cyberspace, might seem harmless, but their vast proliferation is like a tidal wave of negative reinforcement, and tidal waves have a habit of crashing through structures, even intellectual ones.

Edited by author 10-18-2003 12:18 AM
Listen, Z, I know all about Raistlin and Caramon Majere, but let's face it, time moves on. Our bodies grow and get hair and so should our tastes... well, not the hair part so much.. What is it about mystery novels, though, that allows people to read them without shame on the subway in the way that a self-respecting feller can't with the latest by Richard A. Knaack? Is there a hierchy of genre? A pecking order of predilictions? How about making adult covers (eg, Harry Potter) for the latest installment about Luke and Leia's children?

Holy merciful hooch! I've got some reading to do. Obviously something big has happened in this thread. I'll get back to you fine folks when I can catch-up.

It's a good thing you have that baby to wake you up for changings/feedings or you'd be swamped in the morning. I just changed a fresh one and now it's time for bed. Ah, Fridays! Can you smell the sex appeal? From here is is suspiciously similar to that ancient alchemical compound: piddle.

My life. The horror.

Edited by author 10-18-2003 01:13 AM
Ninja,

I read a helluva lot of genre fiction as a kid and into my early-to-mid teens, especially sci-fi and fantasy. However, I couldn't read a mystery on the subway now--even if Halifax had one--without a modicum of shame. Part of this is because I'm a painfully slow reader, even of crap, so time spent with escapist books is time I can't spend with meatier fare. But mostly it's the Rilkean in me; if your life sucks, burying your head in a shitty book won't fix it, and it certainly won't make you realize that you have to fix it. Then again, maybe I'd have time for some pulp if I didn't get so engrossed in Bookninja.com!

(Speaking of meatier fare, where's that damn review of "The Vicinity"? I just read through it once today and I'm itchin to see what the ninjas make of it.)

Edited by author 10-18-2003 02:10 AM
I've read through the thread, and there's too much to comment on all at once, so won't try. At some point I do have to sleep. Even my little one is quietly snoozing at the moment.

I guess a genre becomes a genre because the same kind of story gets told over and over until it becomes automatically familiar. We recognize a romance novel, a mystery novel, a fantasy novel, etc. because these stories have sets of conventions particular to them. But that doesn't mean that once a genre becomes a genre it stops evolving.

Maybe there is a certain danger in the familiarity, or proliferation, of such familiar narratives, if only because familiarity engenders a sense of comfort or complacency. People read genre fiction because they know they won't have to think too hard to absorb it, relying on the conventions they already know to act as a kind of cognitive shorthand. When we get too comfortable with a certain kind of narrative, it's easy for us to overlook any slight changes in ideology that creep in over time.

Take the romance novel, for example. Madeleine mentions Pride and Prejudice, which is actually a satire about the reasons people choose a mate, about "marrying off". Overtime, the satire has evaporated, and what we're left with in present day romance novels is the glorification of falling in love for money. What was once a smart send-up of aristocratic snobbery has the validation of the same shallow values as its legacy.

Reading mystery novels was once a kind of problem-solving pastime, I remember. They were cerebral in the way that all good puzzles are, requiring a certain mental acumen to be solved. Nowadays it seems the mystery novel is more and more the “thriller”. It’s become more indulgent, more sensationalistic, more gory, more formulaic, but less of a puzzle, less of a challenge.

Science fiction, in the 1950s, was seen as the high-intellectual form, even the stuff published in “Amazing Stories” and similar magazines, and today it is widely regarded as escapist twaddle for social-retards, laden with meaningless techno-babble and pie in the sky idealism and/or nihilistic warnings of the end of civilization. Boring, right? I suppose that’s arguable.

I think FK asked an important question: Is fluffy escapism so harmless after all?

He’s got a point (in post #109) about how the prevalence of accepted images and narratives affects, even shapes, social values. Isn’t it a responsibility shared by the artist and the critic alike to be wary of these effects, these downward trends, and to speak out against them?

I think Janine asked an important question, too. What makes us want to escape in the first place. Gender? Class? Race? Childhood trauma? Janine, I think it's different for everyone.

Claude, I think what makes most people want to escape is a sense that they've somehow compromised themselves, that they've bartered a meaningful life for a mess of security-pottage.

I wonder if 'escape' is even an appropriate term, since readers are temporarily leaving one predictable patterned existence only to enter another. Isn't powerful original literature a real escape from the quotidian grind? A harlequin or pulp-fantasy novel isn't so much an escape as a barbiturate. And yes, FK's right, habitual sedation is a very dangerous practice.

I've been thinking about this whole fantasy deal as it relates to the 'reality-show' phenomenon, in particular to "The Bachelor." I only caught the first episode of this series--it wasn't intentional, I swear!--but it seems the appeal of Bob the Bachelor is not only that he is good-looking, charming and wealthy, but that he is also a very flawed person: divorced, past problems with substance abuse and weight. It's like the show's producers could see the flimsiness of their premise, so found a character that would lend more apparent substance to the plot. But of course he's someone who has triumphed over all the adversity to become the Prince Charming he is today. It strikes me as a very disturbing show for too many reasons to get into.

Whoa, Z. Could it be? Are television shows like The Bachelor, For Love or Money, and Joe Millionaire the ultimate devolution of Austen's Pride and Prejudice? A mockery of courtship distilled to its basest elements yet still taken seriously by its myopic participants? Is this an escape? Or merely a decent? And if so, into what?

Re: Claude's "Isn’t it a responsibility shared by the artist and the critic alike to be wary of these effects, these downward trends, and to speak out against them?"

I find it strange that I'm spending so much time defending books with potentially shitty messages, since yes, for years, I've believed the above - I DO think the writer has a responsibility, and certainly this is something I follow in my own work. But at the same time, I am concerned about this idea of the reader as blank slate. Now, maybe it's just that the people I know who read escapist fiction aren't "contaminated" because they are voracious readers and read all sort of other more profound books. Maybe there are lots of women out there who are adversely affected by these messages (certainly the proliferation of shows like The Bachelor would indicate this) but I find this attitude also kind of snobby and condescending. Aren't we saying that people can't think for themselves? How different is this from saying that violence in cartoons or television will inevitably lead to a shoot-out at a highschool?

I'm not saying that these aren't factors - but I think the situations are much more complex. I agree that having less choice in terms of lit means less options to think about - some famous person (can't remember who) once said that the media certainly can't tell you what to think, but it does tell you what to think about. But how we are going to think about these things is going to depend on a whole lot of other factors as well.

I obviously have mixed ideas about this and my apologies if this is full of contradictions. I just feel uncomfortable about some of these assumptions, and I find the snobbery here a bit off-putting. There's an idea here that people who read literature are better and more intelligent than those who read junk books. And that those who read junk books are suffering because they never got the chance to read real books (but who can say that they would have read good lit anyway? Maybe it's a choice between Star Wars and nothing at all). I'm concerned about the elitism here.

Madeleine,

The problem with calling this elitism, as I see it, is that there is a base assumption that intelligence is desirable. I think people who read higher forms of literature are very likely more intelligent, or at the very least, more engaged -- a marker of intelligence. But that doesn't necessarily make them better, or more desirable as people to know. I have plenty of friends who are what we might describe as "average" in both intellectual pursuits (eg, Tostitos and the Bachelor) and literary tastes (eg, Starlequins).

Is encouraging them to read higher forms of literature elitist? Yes, but only the way any kind of preaching is, and has been for about six thousand years.

I just bought my dad George Best's biography. Dad played soccer with Geordie when they were kids in Antrim. The fact that my dad is going to read anything that isn't a newspaper or trade manual leaves me with what I suspect is the same flood of zealous energy a Baptist minister gets after soaking your head in the river. Praise be! Eventually I plan to move him up to Guy Vanderhaeghe.

Have we linked to this in this discussion yet? I think there is some pertinent stuff here.

http://www.reason.com/links/links101603.shtml

G

Hear, here, Ninja, couldn't have said it better myself. Straddling as I do two very different worlds--one highly literate and intellectual, the other blue-collar (which is not to say there's no overlap between the two)--I often get asked, by supposedly enlightened smart people, how I can spend so much time around people who don't read. The answer's simple: we don't talk about books. I might judge the sort of books some people read, but I sure as hell don't judge those people for reading them, just as they don't judge me for being a sissy pansy-boy who writes pomes.

Edited by author 10-18-2003 11:15 AM
While we're on the topic of genre, to what extent is contemporary 'literary' fiction just another genre, marketed as literature to appeal to the intelligent, middlebrow reader? I'm on somewhat thin ice in this area, because I don't read very much contemporary literary fiction, but why does Jane Urquhart get shelved with Kafka, while Danielle Steele gets shelved with Dashiell Hammett? I'd like to see more bookstores have a blanket 'fiction' section that makes the book-buyer decide what's good, rather than point them in the direction of the right ghetto.

On the subject of elitism, I once heard a radio interview with Paul Fussell. When asked if he was an elitist, Fussell said something along the lines of: Certainly. And I'm not ashamed of it, either. If elitism is the constant expectation of excellence, then I am an elitist. Everyone should be an elitist.

That's what the old "Fussy" says, and I don't think I disagree.

Edited by author 10-18-2003 06:18 PM
Nor do I disagree; if given the choice of elite or mediocre, I'll take door no. 1, Bob. That word gets bandied about a helluva lot, and I find its misuse most irritating. It's such an easy shot for someone in a position of inferiority to take. I've been told that the high school and university I went to were elitist institutions. My response is that they are excellent, if only all others could be as good. I went to an 'inclusive'--a very positive adjective--university (Concordia) for grad *ahem* work, and it was crappy. Probably because intelligence and work ethic, or even basic literacy, weren't pre-requisites for admission--this would be 'elitist'.

Sorry to have missed all the activity on this thread. It being the weekend, I had the usual six fabulous parties to attend... but internet chat is fun too. You guys shouldn't feel bad about it.

I like Z's point about lit-fic being a genre. I'm as big a lit-snob as they come and I've got the degrees to back it up, but my snobbery tends to flow less along genre lines than the sleek and catlike lines of "good writing" -- hey, now let's define that. I regularly read the historical spy novels of Alan Furst with little hope or care of finding any ground-breaking literary worth in them. But man, does that guy have the skills with plot.

I know Z, plot is not your bag, but it is one of the essentials in "good writing" and I bow down before a master when I recognize one. Urquhart with Kafka is a travesty of the Canadian book marketing system.

Oh, I've got nothing against plot, per se, it's obviously of fundamental importance. I just can't read a book that offers little else. I'm a big fan of Umberto Eco's 'detective fiction'. Not only does the man have a staggeringly brilliant mind, but he crafts a mean and twisty plot to boot. If the prose is good and there's enough intellectual and emotional meat on the bones of the plot, I'll eat it.

The Lads: Good Riddance

Alex Good on Ladlit and Spitfire.




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Can't remember if it was here that we were discussing Harlequins, etc, but I thought this might be of interest to get things roaring again... Not posting to it tonight, so I throw it to the dog pound.

http://www.nationalpost.com/artslife/story...C-BFBD-43E800D8D815

Women Exist? The National Post Discovers Chick Lit

Of course, it has something to do with Pamela Anderson.




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Worklit

This oughta appeal to a few of the gruffer, more manly ninjas out there.



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On a related worklit note, I saw this guy on TV the other day. I couldn't stop laughing at his story of being mounted by an amorous goat.

http://www.davespress.com/

"And now there's worklit?" Since when is this new?

Ah, work, what writers did before grants. (Just kidding, in case anyone doesn't get it without a smiley face.)

Hey Kathryn, looks like we've got company, eh.

"There's always problems with guys who have time on their hands. You can only drink so much."

He can only drink so much; I've met a good many folks up north who would disagree heartily with this assessment. And not merely on their own time.

Anyone read anything by these guys? I'm wondering if they're any good or just potential recruits for the Can chapter of the ULA.

Paul, I believe John Clare was a pioneer of the genre.

I though work literature has always been a strong theme in Canadian sruff, especially poetry. Acorn, Purdy, Nowlan, those three guys, for sure, but maybe because we're leftier than out southern naighbours, we write more often about "labour" (with a 'u').

Ebo, not to be too rude but if you register using some indicator at the top of your screen, you'll get a cute little star beside your name and the program will let you fix spelling. Also, no one can steal your trusty moniker.

Zach, I never thought of myself as a writer focused on work until you mentioned it. Weird how you can't see yourself. I would have said I'm a writer focused on the body.

Which is equally true, Kathryn, especially since the work in your stories is often of a physical variety. I'm a writer who focuses on writing, but a lot of that writing has involved my job(s); probably because I don't have the sort of imagination that's good at creating things out of whole cloth, so personal experience is the source of most of my poems. And I've had some pretty neat jobs. I mean I spent 5 years as a university student, but that experience hasn't engendered a whole lot of writing.

Yes, Ebo, work writing has a proud tradition in this country. There's Tom Wayman, too, but I'm not a fan of his stuff; his position is that work writing has to be of an unadorned straightforward no-nonsense (he calls this "adult" as opposed to "juvenile" literature) variety, but I see that as condescending to his supposed audience, i.e. workers, and ultimately, in his case, dull. Wayman has also edited a couple of work poetry anthologies for Harbour over the years. A far better poet of the daily grind is Peter Trower, the ex-logger from B.C. He's just a damn good poet. Period. His selected is coming out with Harbour this spring. Look for it. Trower's well-known out west, but for some reason hasn't got the same following as Acorn, Purdy, Nowlan et al in the east. He deserves it, and hopefully this book will get him that kind of national audience. I wrote a column on one of his poems for Arc recently: http://www.cyberus.ca/~arc.poetry/howpoemswork/

But the U.S. is not without their labour writers. I haven't read much of his stuff, but Philip Levine has made a career out of it. Martin Espada has some great poems on the job, too, and he's got a new selected out with W.W. Norton.

And this should probably go in Shameless Self-Promotion in six months or so, but my forthcoming book from Insomniac has a lot of work poems in it. John MacKenzie has done some fine work on such topics too; more in Sledgehammer than in Shaken by Physics. Peter Richardson's new book, tho I haven't got it yet, has a lot of poems about loading airplanes; he's a fine writer and I've heard him read some of the poems from the MS, so I'm confident I can recommend it: "ABC's of Bellywork"(Signal).

Anyone else I'm not thinking of?

Adam Getty has excellent work poems in his debut collection, _Reconciliation_.

Yes, Philip Levine's book "What Work Is" is just marvellous.

No girls? : (

Edited by author 02-04-2004 05:58 PM
Sorry, KK. There's Kate Braid on the left coast: "Covering Rough Ground": lots of pomes 'bout building stuff. And I reckon that there's a fair bit of stuff about more genteel occupations than the ones I've been thinking of, but I don't know of many from the more typically "manly" realms of manual labour and heavy equipment operation. Dorothy Livesay wrote about labour issues, but more as a sympathizer than from firsthand experience.

It's not surprising, really (hence your frowney face?), when you consider how few writers work physical jobs, and then how few women work those jobs (The only female colleagues I ever had in seven years in airline cargo were three shipping clerks--no handlers. There were a couple of handlers in our Ottawa operation during those years, but Ottawa was a sissy-base anyway :). The only other airline freight handler writer of either sex I know of is Peter Richardson.), that there are so few women writing about physical labour. KK, did you work with any other female loggers? I know a fair number who have tree-planted, but there are probably fewer doing this than men, too, I'd wager. Anyway, it's not a bad thing, it's a mark of distinction.

P.K. Page

"The Stenographers" and "Typists"?

Sure, why not? Is work only work if you're breaking your back? Or does breaking your spirit count, too?

No, no, I wasn't challenging the idea of Page as poet of work, just hadn't thought of it before, probably because her approach to such topics is more at a narrative remove than the other folks we've mentioned. Which is neither better nor worse. Those are both brilliant poems and Page is arguably our most important living poet. I was hoping she'd win the Griffin last year; I haven't read "Concrete and Wild Carrot," but "Planet Earth" is a pretty damned stunning collection.

As for breaking back/spirit, ideally work does neither, but makes both stronger. I'm very leery of the straightforward Marxist approach to writing about work. Poems as a platform for "fuck the man" get tedious in a hurry.

Ken Babstock, it occurs to me, has written some great poems about work, like "Deck, it's a Deck" and "Tractor"; poems that get at the fun and accomplishment as well as the tedium and pain of the job.

I Wish I Could Tell You This Were About Gum...

More chick-lit than you can shake a sticklit at.



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*** February 26th and 27th ***

The office will be closed from February 26th to the 27th, 2004. John Degen will be attending the Chalmers Conference in Ottawa and Kristin Jensen will be taking time in lieu for the Executive meeting from February 21st and 22nd.
The National Office will respond to your query on Monday, March 1st.
Thank you.

PS, I Love You follows 30-year-old Holly Kennedy in the 10 months after her husband Gerry's death from a brain tumour. Gerry has left behind envelopes for Holly, one for each month, which are filled with reassurances and advice. No wordy Abelard, Gerry's letters urge her to bid goodbye to his old clothes, to learn to love again, to buy that bedside lamp they really needed, to face her fear of karaoke and so on. Each note ends with the postscript "I love you."

Survey says? BLAAHP! "Ahern tells me the book only took her three months to write. And the publishers bought it after the first several weeks, solely on the basis of her first 10 chapters. (The finished book has 51.) I ask, in as neutral a tone as I can manage, if this quick success surprised her. "I was surprised that everyone else was surprised," she says, adding in a tone that will be familiar to anyone who has ever interviewed a recent college graduate for a job: "I was 21. My friends and I were all like, are we really all supposed to be that stupid? I didn't know 21-year-olds weren't supposed to be writing books. You know, we do all have degrees."' BLAAHP!



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Thanks for this, Ninja. I was walking around Toronto on that beautiful last Friday, and I caught sight of this "writer's" photo on the cover of The Sun. There was some tag expressing delighted surprise that the daughter of the Irish PM would turn out to be a talented novelist, and not just the sparklingly pretty daughter of privilege.

I suppressed my gagging and told myself it would be unfair to pre-judge.

On the other hand, when was the last time a Canadian first-time novelist had her face in newspaper boxes all over the place?

If she is as smart as it takes to "have a degree," she's going to be awfully embarassed one of these days. Imagine, having your first-ever attempt at a novel actually make it to publication.

The horror. The horror.

Oh, and the whole "letter from the grave" thing was in a Michael Keaton movie from about eight years ago, not to mention the recent "My Life Without Me," starring Sarah Polley, a genuinely smart, pretty young woman.

I had some of my first-ever attempts at poems published, and I curse the editors for it to this day. Ugh. The only consolation is that I doubt anyone actually read them.

Would it be too much to suggest a similarity between Ms. Ahern and young Ben Mulroney?

If not, what does the fact that the former has written a book and the latter has hosted Canadian Idol say about their respective native cultures?

More 'Ick-Lit

Well this article is icky, anyway... Just write the facking story and let some grad student with nothing better to do label it.



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[I didn't know where to put this!]

"I wish Dr Whitehead no harm: I have no idea what the pay is like up there at Keele University, but it could surely do with a boost from the proceeds of a self-help best-seller. The book itself sounds like fodder for at least 15 minutes of armchair entertainment, as women jovially attempt to shoehorn their men into unappealing categories such as "Trainspotter" and "Neanderthal", while men campaign to be seen as "Achilles", the flawed charmer, or the sexy-but-dangerous "Backpacker"."

"What worries me, however - all the more so since Dr Whitehead is a member of the rather grand-sounding Cabinet Office Forum on Gender Research - is the idea that anyone might actually take this pop-anthropology seriously, and seek to apply its dictates to real men. Sadly, there is no more fertile territory for the proliferation of lucrative nonsense than the muddy ground between the sexes."



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"Did the women's movement ever happen?"

More chicklit stuff. '"To feel that every piece of literature has to empower women to come out on top, well - what I write is just real life, about those days when you aren't empowered and winning corporate wars or whatever. You're losing your pantyhose and you're lusting after a bag you can't afford. I mean, there's room for both," says author Sophie Kinsella, 34, best- known for her amusing trio of novels known as the "Shopaholic" series.'



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Turns Out All Ick-Lits are for Chicks After All

I wondered about that, but was shouted down at the annual meeting.

Robert Thompson, professor of television and popular culture at Syracuse University, says lad lit was inevitable.

Gender roles have begun to blend, he says. TV's Queer Eye for the Straight Guy shows the equalization of the bathroom vanity, where makeup, mousses and hand creams overflow on the guy's side as well as the woman's.

"It became clear that men were going to get more women if they had a little culture, moussed their hair and read a book now and then," Thompson says.

Yet most men are still guy's guys, and so far, the people reading these titles are the same ones reading chick lit: women. Booksellers, publishers and some authors doubt whether lad lit will attract male readers or have staying power.

What about us select red-necks who read and write poetry and do cuddly things like play with babies and kittens??



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Edited by author 05-17-2004 09:05 AM
"It became clear that men were going to get more women if they had a little culture, moussed their hair and read a book now and then," Thompson says.

That statement warrants this mans' immediate termination by Syracuse University.

"Thompson says the genre appeals to women because they're more comfortable dealing with emotions.

And they're interested in understanding a guy's psyche."

Correction. Not only should Thompson be terminated but he should be flogged as well.

I'm looking forward to the renaissance that will be the suburban-dad genre of literature. Then my charming, emotionally sensitive novel about the trials of toddlers, yard work and beer bellies will find its' niche.

Maybe Professor Thompson would like to propagate it for me? That is, after I'm done beating him with a Palahniuk novel. Make that an Irvine Welsh, novel; Chucks'books lack the necessary bulk to inflict any real damage.

Edited by author 05-23-2004 10:45 AM
On the topic of (d)Ick Lit: apparently the trend has already been declared dead. Link below...

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/23/books/review/23COLUMNM.html

Edited by author 05-31-2004 10:35 PM
Black Chick-Lit

With a rise in demand for books with black characters, settings, and themes, I suppose this was inevitable.*

Like its white counterpart, black chick-lit often centers on single women with dream jobs, precariously balancing the personal and professional. Similarly, too, these new authors write with insiders' knowledge about the glamorous worlds they chronicle.

Neither racially charged nor didactic, these books seem meant to be read on sandy shores from Sag Harbor to St.-Tropez. The protagonists, educated and decidedly middle to upper class, effortlessly mingle with both black and white characters. Love, not privilege, is the only real speed bump.

Oh, so it's fantasy, not romance...



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Inside Saddam's (dick)head

I imagine it's about as clean as that "spider hole" he got hauled out of. Saddam the author examined in relation to dick lit.

It is easy to see why the CIA, MI6 and Mossad have analysed these outlandish tales of heroism and sacrifice in detail. Avi Rubin, an ex-Mossad agent, believes that Saddam's past is at the core of his anger against seemingly broader targets such as western civilisation and Jews. "In reality," Rubin argues, "he is speaking about the pain of his own childhood and upbringing."

(From ALDaily)



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Chick-lit king

And this ain't about gum.*

On a recent sultry Thursday evening in Manhattan, when the summer weekend had already started sucking out the city's energy, Mr. Dickey drew a mostly female crowd at Barnes & Noble that included mothers with babies, older couples and Bergdorf blondes.

God, I would just so love it if that paragraph finished, "And the tiger traps worked like a charm."



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Russell Smith on dick-lit

Hm.



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CroneLit?

A line of fiction for women over 45 (because, you know, they're all the same once they reach 45), Transita, is setting off some hot flashes across the pond.

Read points out that, despite the fact that 40% of the UK's female population is over the age of 45, there isn't an identifiable body of fiction that mirrors the experiences of this group. "Life for the 45-plus woman is very different now than it used to be," she says. "We are redefining our whole attitude towards mid-life, and women want recognition of that in the books they read. They want exciting, inspiration heroines they can relate to".

But Read appears to have opened up a veritable Pandora's box, with critics of the imprint claiming that it is patronising to define women readers in this way.

Embrace your cronehood! Conform! Conform! Does the call to conform ever stop?


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Not exactly sure...

...what this chick-lit article is about, but there's lots of TO newspaper gossip involved. I suspect much of it out of date. However, that said, forget the six-pack and the biceps for a minute... How does anyone have a crush on a conservative? Doesn't the anti-sex field they're all required to fake nullify any longing?


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Killed by Chick-Lit

No, not me after opening the mail last week (though I did remove one or two titles with tongs and run straight for the furnace room) -- the ditzes are learning how to commit murder. No, not of feminism or English prose... I could go on like this. And normally I do. But it's getting late.


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The Devil Wears Mauda!

Maud Newton is angry about the revisionist writing being done in the name of "feminism" to justify chick-lit. I think these people have accidentally used the word "feminism" when they meant "effeminism". (It IS a word!)


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