Art & Criticism – Page 25

And so the great freakshow comes to an end … not quite

Published on June 27, 2009

Over at the Prattle, Feòrag is busy tracking the inevitable Michael Jackson conspiracies, most of which think he faked his own death. More dead celebs have been accused of this, but there was a special kind of inevitability about this one. Jackson’s life story, his public persona and the constant media focus on how much a freak he supposedly is makes that he faked his own death halfway believable. Surely I’m not the only one who tought of that when they heard the news of his death?

It’s fitting that he died in the same way the poor guy had to live his life over the past four decades, in a media freakout. A child star in the early seventies, getting weird at the end of the decade, sleeping in his scarecrow costume from The Whiz, reinventing himself as the biggest selling pop artist ever, Off the Wall, Thriller, giving way to fresh excentricities: Bubbles, Neverland, hyperbaric oxygen chambers and all the other nonsense real or made up by the tabloids, but still canny enough to once again see where pop music was going and be there before it did, followed by more and nastier rumours about his private life, the unsuccesful marriage to the spawn of Presley, the accusations of kiddie fiddling, the lawsuits, the depts, the intended comeback and death. And now the endless speculating about how he died, who’s to blame, what will happen to his heritage, his kids, the feeding frenzy of tv news and tabloids finally faced with a story that they understand, none of that complex financial stuff, that dreary endless slog of more bad tidings about the economy, the environment, Iran… Then later there will be the anniversary specials, the tie-in books, biographies, tell all stories and so on undsoweiter ad infinitum.

Michael Jackson has been a background presence in my life for all my life, mostly an annoying one as I largely couldn’t stand his music and certainly didn’t need to have the Jackson freakshow shoved in my face all these years (and neither did he, I suspect). But only a complete ignoramus would deny his influence on pop music (step forward, Nick Cohen). He broke the colour ban on MTV and made it into the juggernaut it was in the eighties in those fabulous days when it still played music videos. If what he did with “Thriller” or “Bad” or “Beat it” (but never “Billie Jean”) looks corny now it’s because almost everything that came after it has build on his work. Zap through any pop-orientated music channel and half of what you see has been influenced by Jackson’s choreography or music. His influence is so pervasive that you don’t notice it consciouly unless you start looking for it. If Presley was the pop icon of the fifties and sixties, then Jackson was it in the eighties and nineties. To say that he “never was an important musician” is just foolish, but then the evidence that Nick Cohen is a fool is not exactly rare.

So Michael Jackson is dead but the show will go on. That a parasite like Cohen feels the need to attack the media coverage of his dead in service of yet another tawdry blogpost about the elitist ivory tower BBC/media is the best evidence for this…

Andy Remic should just fuck off

Published on June 12, 20094 Comments

Some of the more thin skinned science fiction writers, as well as a certain breed of fan overeager to make everybody part of Club SF, have been whinging again about negative reviews. It’s the usual guff: “there are too many negative reviews”, “it’s all so meanspirited”, “positive reviews are soo much more interesting” and so on. So far, so tedious. But somebody had to take it one step further. One Andy Remic, a published writer though you wouldn’t in a million years guess it from his blog prose, has started the socalled ” Science Fiction and Fantasy Ethics project” which, in his own words (scroll down):

I believe there is a new wave coming. A new wave of positive genre fiction, as can be seen in de Vries Shine anthology, but also a positive movement in the industry and community. I believe there’s a lot of people out there sick of the constant whining and moaning and tearing down – after all, it’s much easier to destroy than create. That’s why myself, and so many other brilliant authors, are involved with the Science Fiction and Fantasy Ethics project (the SFFE) because we want to promote a positive attitude in the industry, and make and ethical stand against the constant poison and vitriol which, I think, has been invading and escalating for a long time.

I chose the name “Ethics” not because I wanted to explore the ethical contexts of novels or films, but because I wanted to make an ethical stand against the motherfuckers who, to my mind, are systematically ruining the SFFH genres. In short, I wanted to do what I believed was intrinsically, morally, ethically and intuitively right. I want to celebrate everything that is good in SFFH, because it’s all subjective, right?? – and, hopefully, we can lead by positive example.

Shorter Andy Remic: I want to remake science fiction in my own image through the power of positive reviews. Not that science fiction needs remaking, certainly not by making criticism more upbeat and “positive”. Science fiction is far too protective already of its bad writers, fans and critics alike overlooking dodgy science and dodgier politics, cardboard characters and clockwork plots for any old bit of sensawunda.

Now it might just be observer bias, but I’ve always found it was the bad writers who moaned the most about negativity, who are obsessed with remaking science fiction into something positive, a return to some imagined golden age of sf writing. Remic at least is no exception. If the quote above is not bad enough, take a look at the Science Fiction and Fantasy Ethics Project’s blog, which should be a showcase of what Remic and his followers consid good reviews.

I wasn’t impressed. The reviews largely consist of plot summaries combined with meaningless praise as in this review. The writing itself is awful as well, as seen in the following quote. “Williams’ storytelling is stellar throughout this novel. The writing never falters. His ability to paint a picture with words is undeniable. This is a real page turner.“. Not exactly sparkling prose.

To set yourself up as the great saviour of science fiction from the “motherfuckers” who are “systematically ruining” science fiction is obnoxious enough already, but then to fail so miserable at writing readable reviews as well? That’s unforgiveable.

Myth Conceptions

Published on May 19, 2009

In an otherwise standard post about the misguided longing of readers for an imagined Golden Age of book publishing, Robert McCrum

Myth Three: In the good old days, books were longer, and more demanding. Today, given the minuscule attention span of the Twitter Age, the classics of yesteryear will inevitably slip off the modern reader’s radar. This is simply not true. For every mammoth Dickens or Henry James (and yes, there are plenty of those), there were also miracles of brevity. The Great Gatsby is barely 60,000 words long. Most Graham Greene novels come in at about 220 pages; Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall is barely 175 pages in my edition. With the exception of 1984, George Orwell rarely wrote more than 250 pages. Michael Ondaatje’s brilliant first book, Running in the Family, is scarcely 180 pages; Elizabeth Taylor’s marvellous novel The Wedding Group just 230 pages. And so on.

What’s interesting is that this supposedly common “myth conception” (thank you Robert Asprin!) is the direct inverse of a common complaint of older science fiction readers. Hang out at any sf blog or forum and sooner or later you’ll hear some old fart complaining about how nobody writes short books anymore like they did in the Golden Age when a novel had a good idea, great characters and a proper plot and only needed 150 pages to do so! Readers who sample these classics without the benefit of nostalgia will quickly notice how shallow most of them actually were, with cardboard characters and barely developed plots, but that never stopped the old farts. One wonders what the current science fiction and fantasy reader, having grown up with fat fantasy bricks and 700 page space operas will moan about in thirty years….

Sounds familiar?

Published on March 28, 2009

George Eliot on Silly Novels by Lady Novelists, as written in 1856:

The heroine is usually an heiress, probably a peeress in her own right, with perhaps a vicious baronet, an amiable duke, and an irresistible younger son of a marquis as lovers in the foreground, a clergyman and a poet sighing for her in the middle distance, and a crowd of undefined adorers dimly indicated beyond. Her eyes and her wit are both dazzling; her nose and her morals are alike free from any tendency to irregularity; she has a superb contralto and a superb intellect; she is perfectly well-dressed and perfectly religious; she dances like a sylph, and reads the Bible in the original tongues. Or it may be that the heroine is not an heiress — that rank and wealth are the only things in which she is deficient; but she infallibly gets into high society, she has the triumph of refusing many matches and securing the best, and she wears some family jewels or other as a sort of crown of righteousness at the end. Rakish men either bite their lips in impotent confusion at her repartees, or are touched to penitence by her reproofs, which, on appropriate occasions, rise to a lofty strain of rhetoric; indeed, there is a general propensity in her to make speeches, and to rhapsodize at some length when she retires to her bedroom. In her recorded conversations she is amazingly eloquent, and in her unrecorded conversations, amazingly witty. She is under stood to have a depth of insight that looks through and through the shallow theories of philosophers, and her superior instincts are a sort of dial by which men have only to set their clocks and watches, and all will go well.

Found via TV Tropes (don’t click if you want to do anything today), it shows Mary Sue is one of the oldest tricks in the book.

“It’s like hard SF where the science is literary history.”

Published on March 26, 2009

On the Tor website, Jo Walton talks about one of her favourite books, A. S. Byatt’s Possession.

Possession is an odd book, and I love it and re-read it frequently. It’s about scholars in 1987 trying to find out some precise events that happened in the late nineteenth century and which concern the relationship between two poets. But what it’s really about is the way we are what time has made of us, whether we know it or not, the way we exist in our time and place and circumstances and would be different in any other. The way it does this, the very precise way in which the theme is worked out in all the curlicues of the story, makes the experience of reading it more like reading SF than like a mainstream work.

Jo Walton was a science fiction reader and fan long before she became a published writer. What she’s doing for Tor now, back in the mid-nineties she did on rec.arts.sf.written and I can’t tell you how many books and writers I only discovered through them. Including Possession.