Art & Criticism – Page 21

Unsuccesful minor writer in literature snobbery shock

Published on December 12, 2010

One Edward “my surname is not a Microsoft trademark” Docx gets the opportunity in The Guardian today to moan about those horrid, horrid bestselling genre writers taking away readers that belong to proper literaty writers. Ho-hum. It’s nothing you haven’t seen before and done better, an insipid bit of literary trolling a cynical man might think was done to get the Guardian some hits and our Docx friend some publicity just in time for the publication of his next novel. Pointless to respond to it, to either defend genre writing or to show where he stacked the deck, that would just take him much more seriously than he deserves.

Remains just to note that the p.r. blurb for his latest work does make it sound awfully like a genre novel:

Dr Forle is a scientist living on a river station deep in the South American jungle. Founded by his mysterious mentor, Quinn, his is the last manned post before the impassable interior. Forle’s small band of colleagues are an international crew, working with locals to study the eerie forest glades – created by poison ants – that the Indians call ‘devil’s gardens’. When a strange canoe docks at the jetty one afternoon and offloads not just their usual supplies but an unannounced Colonel and a sinister Judge, life on the station is thrown into chaos. These men claim to be registering the local Indian tribes to vote. But on the night of their arrival, Forle witnesses a terrible act of torture. Unable to ignore what he has seen and yet unwilling to abandon his work, he is drawn deeper and deeper into a world of brutality and corruption: a small war involving remote tribes, the army, cocaine growers and even Sole, the half-Indian woman whom he had come to love. When one of his assistants is murdered, Forle is forced to abandon his life’s work and take sides. But what kind of a man is he? In the tradition of such classics as “The Heart of Darkness” and “The Lord of the Flies”, “The Devil’s Garden” is a contemporary and mesmeric study of power and corruption from one of our rising literary stars.

Racefail: not just for science fiction anymore

Published on December 8, 2010

Roxane Gay reads this years Best American Short Stories, finds almost every story in the anthology was about rich or nearly rich white people:

What I felt most while reading BASS was a profound sense of absence. Sure there was a story about black people (written by Danielle Evans, coincidentally) and there was a story about a mechanic, to bring in that working class perspective and there was a story set in Africa, but most of the stories were uniformly about rich white people (often rich, white old men) doing rich white people things like going on safari or playing poker and learning a painful lesson or lamenting old age in Naples. Each of these stories was wonderful and I don’t regret reading them, but the demographic narrowness is troubling. It’s not right that anyone who isn’t white, straight, or a man, reading a book like this, which is fairly representative of the work being published by the “major” journals, is going to have a hard time finding experiences that might, in some way, mirror their own. It’s not right that the best writing in the country, each year, is writing about white people by white people with a few splashes of color or globalism (Africa! Japan! the hood!) for good effect. Things have certainly improved over the years but that’s not saying much.

At the same time, she also find her own succes being questioned for the usual reasons:

Anytime you achieve even a little bit of success there’s going to be someone who suggests you earned that success because you’re a person of color (or a woman, or both). Even though you might know you achieved your success because you’re awesome, because you worked hard for years, because you beat down doors until one fell down, you are stuck with the niggling doubt that they’re right. You worry that everyone thinks that way so you can never really enjoy your success, you always push yourself to do better, to do more, to be the best, to be so good they have to stop saying it’s just because you’re a person of color. It is exhausting.

All of which confirms the superiority of science fiction and fantasy fandom, as

Most of 2009, the science fiction/fantasy community was embroiled in a contentious debate about race that was so extensive and ongoing that it even got its own name and wiki: RaceFail, but hey, at least the SF/F community is talking about these issues which cannot be said for other writing communities.

Which is surely the most important point to take away from these two posts. More seriously, it’s strangely heartening to see that the problems sf and fantasy struggle with (the representation of non-white/male/straight voices and viewpoints, the problems with appopriation, systemic racism and underrepresentation of people of colour and so on) are not unique to it. It means that it’s not impossible for science fiction/fantasy to change for the better.

Bad readers

Published on December 6, 2010

Nick Mamatas:

Right-wing conventionals see moral instruction as paramount in a story, and left-wing conventionals see immoral instruction as paramount to avoid in a story. Both positions can only come from the heads of poor readers. It is useful to point out “preachiness” on the one hand and potential offense on the other, especially when the author may not even realize that they are either preaching or offending, but conventionalists rarely stop at the text. Every story in a workshop is some sort of ethical litmus test, and even when there is no outrageous content there is often outrageous aesthetics. Is first-person fascist because it TELLS the reader WHAT TO THINK?? Certainly not, but I’ve heard this declared from liberal nitwits. Is anything other than third-person objective point of view in past tense told with “plain language” somehow sign of a homosexual/Communist plot? Anyone who has ever read one of the rambling semiliterate editorials in Tangent knows the answer to that! And let’s not forget the tyranny of “story” which conventionals always chirp abut. The morons even go on about Shakespeare as some sort of populist cartwheeler, as if people still look at Romeo and Juliet for the plot, which is “spoiled” by the author himself anyway in the Prologue. (“From forth the fatal loins of these two foes/A pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life.”)

Gr’unn!

Published on August 6, 20101 Comment

cover of Gromnibus

A can’t miss bargain to be had at De Slegte in Amsterdam right now: copies of Gr’omnibus, a treasure trove of sequential art from Groningen, the Athens of the North; an invaluable treasure now yours for only two euro fifty! Why you should bother? Because you get to sample some 40 odd (some very odd) Dutch (as well as the occasional furreign) cartoon talents, culled from the pages of one of the most consistent of Dutch underground comix zines, G’runn.

Most foreigners might be forgiven for believing there’s not much more to the Netherlands than Amsterdam, Den Haag and perhaps some pittoresque village like (ugh) Volendam, with Zeeland thrown in for free for our German friends who tend to encamp on the beaches there each summer in a more benign re-enactment of the Maydays of 1940, but there are other interesting cities in the rest of the Netherlands as well, even up North. Groningen (Gr’unn in the local dialect) is one of them, a university town big enough not to be overwhelmed by it with a decent local art scene and nightlife, a city in which over the years a thriving alt-comix scene has been established.

In 1996 a few of them started Gr’unn, which since then has published a lot of up and coming cartoonists. People like Barbara Stok, Mark Hendriks, Amoebe, the Lamelos collective, Marcel Ruijters, Reinder Dijkhuis, Berend Vonk, all had strips in Gr’unn. And as such it helped establish, together with Zone 5300 and more amateur zines like Impuls or Iris, the first generation of cartoonists neither interested in going the traditional comics route of magazines or newspapers, nor in consciously rebelling against this, but who just went their own way.

Any anthology of a comix zine celebrating its ten years anniversary will always be uneven and of course Gr’omnibus is this as well. Some of the cartoonists are better or more interesting than others, while there’s a huge mix of styles and subjects represented as well. But there is common ground as well. Autobiographical or fantasy, stick figures or obsessive crosshatching, what most of the stories and artists present have in common is a prediliction for the light ironic and the cynical, short gag stories but with a twist of bitterness and not too much emotional investment. It’s a style of writing I quite like, though it can be a bit wearing in large doses. No real masterpieces here, but still more gems than dross and no real bad stories either.

So if you’re in Amsterdam and you want a cheap way to sample a huge chunk of the contemporary Dutch comix scene, go get Gr’omnibus from de Slegte. It’s in the middle of Kalverstraat so even tourists should be able to find it.

Paolo Bacigalupi: threat or menace?

Published on July 18, 2010

Every few years or so a science fiction writer comes along who becomes the darling of the critics, especially mainstream critics deigning to notice the genre, but whose qualities on closer inspection seem to be mostly so much hot air. Stephen Baxter was one of those writers, praised by Locus for his hard science fiction, winning award after award in the nineties, but never doing anything for me. Today it’s Paolo Bacigalupi, praised for his realism and worldbuilding and his non-western settings. His first novel, The Windup Girl just won the Nebula and Locus Awards. All good stuff, right, but why when reading descriptions like the one below and this from a positive review do I feel queasy?

In essence, Emiko has been designed to be a supremely beautiful, compliant geisha. Obedience has been built into her DNA. Her skin has been made ivory smooth by reducing the size of her pores. Never intended to function in a tropical climate, Emiko has nonetheless been callously abandoned in Bangkok: Her patron decided “to upgrade new in Osaka.” She was then bought by the unscrupulous Raleigh, a survivor of “coups and counter-coups, calorie plagues and starvation,” who now “squats like a liver-spotted toad in his Ploenchit ‘club,’ smiling in self-satisfaction as he instructs newly arrived foreigners in the lost arts of pre-Contraction debauch.”

If not out and out racist (and of course, filtered through Michael Dirda’s review), this is orientalist to say the least, delving into the old stereotypes of the Far East and justifying it with genetic mumbo jumbo. It may just be an unfortunate element in this story, but then there’s his traveling through China story in Salon:

I’m not proud of it, but I’m a great liar when I travel. I smile and lie and things are smooth. Every once in a while I don’t just lie to smooth the way, I lie for fun. Once, I told a taxi driver in Beijing that I’d been studying Chinese for a week. This, after having painfully studied the language for four years and lived and worked (and lied) in Beijing for another year. I think I even told him that Chinese was an easy language to learn. Perhaps most people wouldn’t think that’s funny, but it was the only time a Chinese person ever told me my Chinese was very good and really meant it.

My restaurant companion looked at me more closely and asked, “And what do you think of the Chinese people?”

Cold and heartless, but nice if you’re in their clique of friends. “They’re great, too,” I said.

Which makes me go hmmm again. It’s all a bit dodgy even without the genetically engineered elephants powering factories and the huge metal springs serving as batteries…