Happy Canada Day

In hono(u)r of my adopted nation's national holiday, I had the following conversation at airport security screening, while making my way from Raleigh to Washington, DC:

"Boarding card and ID, please."

"Here you go." 

I hand over my license and ticket.

Pause.  Careful, lengthy scrutiny of my license.

"Do you have a passport?"

"Uh, yeah, let me get it."

"Sorry. It's just that we only accept American and Canadian driver's licenses."

"Ok, well, Nova Scotia is in Canada."

"What?  Really?"

Nodding.

"No - really?"

Now, the real question is, how shall I hono(u)r the Fourth of July?

Perhaps I will spend the day contemplating the following conversation, which I had with a fellow American we met while traveling in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia (wherever that is - near Sweden?):

"So, where are y'all from?"

"Well, D's from New York and North Carolina, but lives in Los Angeles now, and I live in Halifax.  But I grew up in Washington, DC."

"Ha! I'm sorry." This last is followed by a knowing smirk.

Now, I ask you.  In what possible situation is it remotely within the bounds of politeness to deride a stranger's home to her face?  Would I ever have said "Oh, you're from Georgia?  Ha! I'm sorry!"?  No, sir (as they say in NC), I would not.  Would that I could say that this is the first time this has happened.  I can't even count the number of times I have been left with an awkward silence, unable to think of what to say next, after this kind of reaction.

Most of these strangers have probably never been to DC, which (as I saw in today's unusually vernal weather) is a city of both profound problems* and stunning beauty. This isn't what people think of when they deride it, though - they think of government gridlock and empty political posturing.  But the politicians aren't Washingtonians.**  They come from other states to my hometown, and give it a terrible rep.  Hrumph.

Yes, I think I should be able to work up a celebratory grump on the subject that will last all day on Saturday.  At least until I watch the world's best fireworks display over the National Mall.  This is indeed a sorry place to be from....



*Many of them exacerbated by the fact that most of those who use the city and its resources don't actually live there and pay local taxes, leading to a harsh juxtaposition between wealth and poverty.


** We are largely disenfranchised in Congress.

On love, liberty, and the pursuit of novel-writing

Joan/Sarah F at Dear Author has a fascinating and nuanced post up about the ethics and politics of historical accuracy in m/m historical romance.  This sounds like an issue with a very narrow audience, and some of you might (and certainly are) saying, "Oh, I'm not a romance reader" or "m/m romance? Are these words coming out of your mouth even the English language?". 

Admittedly, this isn't a genre of romance I've ventured into, but it is a booming one, and one in which a lot of issues of theoretical, readerly, and academic interest are being raised.  The largest of these is this: why is this genre, which takes gay men as its subject, mostly being produced and consumed by straight women? (My favorite line of this article? “You don’t have to commit murder to write a good mystery.”)  What are the ethics of this, and what are we to make of its aesthetics (or erotics)?  In other words, what does this say about the nature of desire and literary identification?

But Joan/Sarah F. raises a whole array of other scholarly issues.  First, and most important for scholars of the novel or the romance:

Only the 18th century could have made the idea of marrying for love the dominant narrative. For reasons both social (rise of middle class, literacy, leisure time, disposable income) and technological (paper, printing, book binding), only the 18th century could have invented and popularized the novel. And, most importantly, only the 18th Century could have focused that novel on the feminine and the domestic, on the ways in which two people negotiate their love, form a relationship, and become the ideal social unit. We think about love and relationships the way we do today because of the 18th century and, in unavoidably connected ways, we read the romance novels we read today because of the 18th century roots of the novel.

She then goes on to address the problem of identity as historically contingent: in other words, it was only in the last century that the idea of homosexuality as identity (as opposed to a set of discrete actions) comes into clear being.  It hardly seems coincidental that this shift occurs in tandem with the inward turn of humanism and the Enlightenment.

Because of this, she goes on to say, post-Renaissance historical romance can examine the role of romantic love in claiming the liberties of individual rights, establishing the nature of modern privacy, and outlining the physical body as one boundary between personal freedom and social power:

writing about a man in the eighteenth century, who is what we would now consider gay, fall[ing] in love with another man entails detailing how he comes to realize that he CAN fall in love with his sexual partner. [...] More importantly, to have historical m/m romance claim the same narrative as m/f romance, a narrative that is inextricably intertwined in the political, social, and civil rights of the individual to choose their own destiny, makes writing m/m romance a political act, and writing accurate m/m historical romance vitally important.

 She concludes by extending this move from the ethical realm to the political one:

The historical accuracy of the way people thought about themselves, about love, about sex, about IF they could fall in love and WHO they could fall in love with, the etymology of the terminology they used to imagine their relationships, is vital to the progress of their relationship because the very WORDS we use define how we think and how we see and interact with our world. So why write m/m HISTORICAL romance if you’re not going to play around with that?

Even if you aren't a reader of romance, take a look at her post: it raises important issues about the ways romantic love and an Enlightenment conception of personal liberty are entwined with the very nature of the novel itself.

The Agony and the Ecstasy of Author Glomming

Inspired by Nicole's idea at bibliographing, I have been moved to examine my own list of most read authors.  Off I went to LibraryThing, where I clicked on the "already read tag," organized the list by author, and examined the results with some satisfaction and a creeping sense of chagrin:

William Shakespeare - 39
Tom Stoppard - 28
Elizabeth Peters - 19
Lewis Trondheim/Joann Sfar - 17
George Bernard Shaw - 10
Neil Gaiman - 9
Charlaine Harris - 9
Sam Shepard - 8
Judy Cuevas / Judith Ivory -8
Bill Willingham  - 8
J.K. Rowling - 8
Brian K. Vaughan  - 8
Ursula K. Le Guin - 7
Martin McDonagh - 6
Jane Austen - 6
Oscar Wilde - 6
Boris Akunin - 5
Agatha Christie - 5
Susan Cooper - 5
Charles Dickens - 5
Alan Moore - 5
Tamora Pierce - 5

Some greater philosophical questions immediately leaped to mind.

First, naturally, What does this list say about me?

Well, I am a reader of, let us say, disparate and polyglot tastes.  You can see the residue of a decade spent pursuing degrees in Literature in the presence of various classics (Dickens, Austen), and the marks of a lifetime spent in the study of drama in the inclusion of playwrights like Stoppard, Shaw, and Shepard.  Combine this with an obviously completist approach to Shakespeare, and you can see that the "S" section of my "Already read" library* is a vasty prospect.

But you can also see that I am a voracious devourer of comics (Alan Moore, Brian K. Vaughan of Y: The Last Man, Bill Willingham of the Fables series, and Trondheim and Sfar, frequent collaborators on the brilliant Dungeon series whose work I have lumped together here), mysteries (Elizabeth Peters, Agatha Christie, Boris Akunin), romances (the stunningly literary Judith Ivory, and Charlaine Harris, whose presence on this list is the real source of my blushes**), YA of the fantasy variety (Susan Cooper, J.K. Rowling, Tamora Pierce), as well as fantasy more broadly (Neil Gaiman and Ursula K. Le Guin).

Immediately after blushing for the amount of genre literature on this list, I began to question my own academicky prejudices: is this really a cause for embarrassment?  Certainly not. I am pleased by the breadth of my tastes, in literature as in film and music.  It shows a flexibility that is one of my own favorite features.  Even when I dislike something, that repulsion is usually accompanied by a nagging feeling that I want someone who loved it to communicate the details and causes of that love to me.  The pleasure to be gleaned from hating something is, for me, less rich than the pleasure of loving it.

The only cause for embarrassment comes in seeing that you have devoted a great deal of time to reading books that you haven't particularly enjoyed or admired.  And there are a few of those on here.  Harris's books are the prime example of books that are addictive without being (any more, at least) really enjoyable.  Peters's mysteries are others that I enjoyed tremendously without admiring to the point that I would recommend them as literature (and many in number are the genre books that I would recommend as literature, I hasten to say:  Judith Ivory's Black Silk, for example, or Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness.  Or, for that matter, Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials Trilogy, which doesn't appear on this list.).  The Willingham and Vaughan comics fall into the same category as the Peters mysteries.  And apart from Gaiman's very good Sandman comics, I have always found him more compelling as a personality and blogger than as a novelist.

So, What does this list say about this list?

First of all, it says that the authors you read most are not necessarily the authors you like best.  Often, they are simply either the authors it is easiest and fastest to read, or the authors who have written the most books and longest series.  Both of these factors contribute substantially to the glommability of an author's canon.  Jane Austen, for instance, would have ranked much higher had she lived longer and thus written more.  I have never read an Austen novel that was less than an impeccably-crafted page-turner, but I have (alas) read all of the long works now.  I glom Austen.  I glom her most heartily.

Because of some of the reasons mentioned above, it also says that genre authors are going to be disproportionately represented on lists like these.  I am reluctant to generalize beyond my own reading habits, but I will tentatively say that many, like me, read genre fiction faster than the ickily-designated "literary fiction."  With the exception of works like Joe Sacco's excellent Palestine, I read graphic novels considerably faster than their prose brethren.  (This is a flaw in my reading: in fact, I should be reading them much more slowly, since I process images more lumberingly than I do words.)  Fantasy, mystery, young adult fiction, and romance are also quite a bit more likely, as genres, to appear in series, which demand that you move on to another by the author as soon as you have finished one.

There are also a few flaws in my methodology here:

First, there are gaps in the records. The books included encompass only those I have read since beginning a book diary at age ten. They also fail to take into account the many years since in which my record-keeping (and record-translating-to-LibraryThing) has been spotty, lazy, or entirely void (I'm looking at you, senior year of high school.  I know more than five books were read that year, regardless of how much time I spent on the phone with my boyfriend.).

Secondly, some genres are hard to account for via LibraryThing.  LibraryThing records the volumes of literature that you read, but with drama, for instance, I often read full-length works in anthologies, without completing the full volume (and thus without marking it as read on LT).  I feel certain that more playwrights should appear on this list, but can't quite put my finger on who they would be.


Still, intriguing.  I am most interested to note the dearth of contemporary, non-genre fiction writers on this list. Ishiguro, for instance, is a favorite who barely failed to make the list. (I have A Pale View of Hills on the nightstand, ready to remedy this injustice.)  But what of other favorite likes Auster, Barker, or Munro? My tendency, I suppose, is to read broadly in contemporary literature, rather than deeply.  Hmm.

What, I ask you, would your list look like? And what, more importantly, would your feelings about it be?



*Which occupies the basement and ground floor of my house and a whole wall of my office.  The "To be read" library (also known as Mt. TBR) occupies a much vaster territory - the middle and top floors of the house, and the two other bookshelved walls of the office.  Sometimes it intimidates me.  But most of the time it fills me with a sense of cosmic rightness.


** More on this soon, I expect.