It’s International Blog Against Racism Week. To see the many amazing contributions bloggers have been making (this year and last), visit the IBARW del.icio.us page. Within that collection of links, there are about 50 (so far) blog posts on writing and race. I want to highlight a few here that deal specifically with the question of authorial intent and reader interpretation, particularly within genre writing.

Kameron Hurley addresses why writing colorblind is writing white.

Kate Nepveu posts on reading through default assumptions.

Yoon Ha Lee makes the point that “Even if race is not an issue in the universe in which you are writing, it is an issue for the reader.”

And two posts by Pam Noles about racial representation, reader identification, and whitewashing disguised as colorblindness: “Shame”, and a follow-up post addressing responses to that essay.

Go, read, think. I will be, too.

Ruth Franklin, Slate, 8 May 2007, reviewing Michael Chabon’s newest book:

Michael Chabon has spent considerable energy trying to drag the decaying corpse of genre fiction out of the shallow grave where writers of serious literature abandoned it.

An excerpt from Ursula Le Guin’s response in Ansible, July 2007:

God damn that Chabon, dragging it out of the grave where she and the other serious writers had buried it to save serious literature from its polluting touch, the horror of its blank, pustular face, the lifeless, meaningless glare of its decaying eyes! What did the fool think he was doing? Had he paid no attention at all to the endless rituals of the serious writers and their serious critics — the formal expulsion ceremonies, the repeated anathemata, the stakes driven over and over through the heart, the vitriolic sneers, the endless, solemn dances on the grave? Did he not want to preserve the virginity of Yaddo? Had he not even understand the importance of the distinction between sci fi and counterfactual fiction? Could he not see that Cormac McCarthy — although everything in his book (except the wonderfully blatant use of an egregiously obscure vocabulary) was remarkably similar to a great many earlier works of science fiction about men crossing the country after a holocaust — could never under any circumstances be said to be a sci fi writer, because Cormac McCarthy was a serious writer and so by definition incapable of lowering himself to commit genre? Could it be that that Chabon, just because some mad fools gave him a Pulitzer, had forgotten the sacred value of the word mainstream?

The sheer awesomeness of this requires a *\o/*! Do go read the whole thing — the whole Le Guin piece, that is. The snooty anti-genre rhetoric in Franklin’s review is a derivative waste of time.

There’s a particular pleasure in reading an articulately written and deeply negative review of something you also despise.

For example, Momus reviews Pan’s Labyrinth:

I thought it was a terrible film, deeply impoverished both in imagination and in its moral vision, stale to the core, and brutal to boot. It actually saddens and infuriates me that this kind of thing is what passes for fantasy, humanity and imagination, and that no single critic, apparently, took the film to task for its great failings, which I’ll number here, as I see them …

YES. Gah.

I’m reading Julie Phillips’s biography of Alice Sheldon/James Tiptree, Jr. It’s excellent and I’m entranced.

In the beginning I was merely interested, because I found it tough to relax into the biographical form as Phillips practices it. Having spent this semester working on (among other things) Austen’s use of modal verbs, I was struck and a little annoyed by Phillips’s use of “must” and “should have,” her reliance on conditional forms to buttress psychological claims about Sheldon. That choice reminded me, not pleasantly, of the more biographical bits of the Gilbert-and-Gubar style of feminist criticism — another critical mode I view with sympathy and support but can’t help quibbling with, either. Phillips’s “musts” seem, at times, to push too hard to nail down the unknowable:

She also acquired a .38 revolver, which she either bought or was given by Bill at a time when a sensational carjacking and murder had made the New Mexico roads seem unsafe. It was this gun, acquired for self-defense, that Alice claimed Bill had used against her. (She also once suggested that she had used it for a game of Russian roulette.) Nonetheless, she kept it. Later in life, whenever she was depressed enough to think of killing herself, she always pictured doing it with the .38. The gun must have given her a sense of power over death. [James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon, 96]

That pithy last sentence! Why? It’s a shove from drama into banality. It flattens an ambivalent and interesting and totemic-seeming fact.

I’m quibbling, as I said — the book is just wonderful, and the psychologizing conditional statements either grow fewer, or integrate more smoothly into Phillips’s thoughtful and careful treatment of Sheldon/Tiptree, or both. (I’ll have to reread it to tell; right now I’m too grabbed by it.) But I wish that, in the early chapters, Phillips had allowed more of Alice’s ambivalence to remain unencapsulated.

More on this later, when I’m done with the book.

ETA: I read the last half of the book in a happy rush yesterday and this morning, and while I stand by my quibbling, I think the whole thing’s delightful. The primary sources make up a great portion of the book’s brilliance — Sheldon/Tiptree wrote wonderful letters — but Phillips does a beautiful job, too.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden takes on Charles McGrath’s recent column about Philip K. Dick in the New York Times, which features — you guessed it — the greatest hits of condescending clichés about genre fiction. Nielsen Hayden concludes:

Dick is definitely a major SF writer, very much worth reading, and some of the standard cliches about him are surely true. But McGrath’s essay is an impressive example of the kind of normative blather dubbed “bookchat” by Gore Vidal, writing whose main purpose is to explain to anxious readers whether it’s socially acceptable to like this stuff or not.

I won’t be teaching my planned course on the rhetoric of popular fiction in the fall, but if I were, this would be added to the ever-increasing pool of material on anxiety about literary taste and the “genre ghetto.” See also: Colleen Mondor’s recent and equally great post about Wired’s article on the subject.

Some days I think I should just call this blog “Genre Snootinesswatch.” In an otherwise interesting, if a bit overly cute, article on annotated editions of novels in (yet again) the NY Times, William Grimes writes:

Extreme devotees of Austen do not simply enjoy the novels, they want to sit in the living room at Longbourn with the Bennet sisters, drinking tea and analyzing Darcy’s behavior. An entire subliterary genre, the Regency romance, exists to satisfy this desire.

Uh, a “subliterary genre”? Not, say, a “literary subgenre”? Or even, perhaps more accurately, a “marketing subgenre”?

Sigh.

Another episode in the “transcends genre” drinking game, from Sunday’s NY Times review of Tom McCarthy’s Remainder:

The subject of identity — how human memory and reality might be manipulated by outside agents — features in countless futuristic books, stories and films, and has been especially popular in the last decade as advances in the visual, auditory and surgical arts have made us increasingly wary of trusting our senses. But McCarthy’s superb stylistic control and uncanny imagination transport this novel beyond the borders of science fiction.

I’m now imagining a wall at the border between Science Fiction and Literary Fiction, not unlike the short section of “peace wall” I saw in Belfast in 2001 — dented, the base of it strewn with chunks of broken brick, the occasional bent bike wheel lying boomeranged on the ground.

Just stopping by to post a quick recommendation for Rackstraw Press’s new anthology, Glorifying Terrorism, a collection of stories published in response to the UK Terrorism Act of 2006. As Ned Beauman says on the Guardian book blog:

… we should be happy that in 2006 science fiction pulled on its balaclava. Whether or not we can wring out the slightest sympathy for suicide bombers from Iraq or Palestine or Leeds, we should certainly be forced to try, if only to clarify our thinking. And while mainstream authors such as Updike and Amis and Rushdie have tried to take us into the mind of terrorists, they stopped short of what would have been far more disturbing and effective: making their plotters into likeable heroes and seducing us into a unwary emotional involvement with their struggle.

Only science fiction has gone that far, and for this — even more than for decrying the theft of our civil liberties — it deserves our rapt attention.

(Link via Colleen Mondor)

I remember seeing this call for submissions last year; I’m fiercely glad the project was successful.

I’m in the middle of prepping for class at the moment, but I direct your attention to Justine Larbalestier’s satisfying rant about Maureen Dowd’s latest column, on chick lit.

I haven’t read Dowd’s column myself; it’s behind the pay wall, and, frankly, her obsession with referring to politicians by faux-cutesy pet names annoys me so much that I’ve stopped reading her, period. But Justine does an excellent job of highlighting the key elements familiar from many Times pieces on genre fiction: inadequate sample size; blithe generalization; treating all genre works as “interchangeable.” Maybe there should be some kind of drinking game for this sort of thing?

I’m going to have to create a tag just for New York Times reviews that use some variation on the concept of “transcending genre” when discussing works with fantastical, science fictional, or speculative content.

This time, Caryn James lauds P. D. James’s Children of Men in the following terms:

“The Children of Men” is not another of Ms. James’s famed detective novels, and it is not, as it has sometimes sloppily been described, science fiction. It is a trenchant analysis of politics and power that speaks urgently to this social moment, a 14-year-old work that remains surprisingly pertinent. Mr. Cuarón and Mr. Owen have made a film that works superbly apart from the book, but Ms. James’s extraordinary novel deserves to be rediscovered on its own.

In both forms “Children of Men,” which opened Monday, is a story of redemption, set in England just decades in the future (the film takes place in 2027), when women have inexplicably lost the ability to become pregnant. Utterly cynical, Theo (Mr. Owen) is drawn into a group trying to protect a woman who has, just as inexplicably, become pregnant and whose child is likely to be used for the despotic government’s own purposes.

Er, which elements of the book are not recognizably science fictional? The dystopian future setting? The fact that the dystopia takes place “just decades” from now? The “inexplicably” lost fertility of the human race, or the “just as inexplicably” regained fertility of one woman? It must be the fact that the book is “a trenchant analysis of politics and power that speaks urgently to this social moment.” Surely no SF could claim that kind of insight. GAG.