pornokitsch

Super 8 and the Big But

So, we finally got around to watching JJ Abrams' Super 8 a few nights ago, and it was really fun! I enjoyed it more than I expected. Jared enjoyed it more than he expected. It fell into that particularly robust niche of (arguably peculiarly American) storytelling: a boy reconnects with his estranged father. Their story opens with them as far from each other as they can be; by the end of it, they’re playing catch.

There’s a second, interrelated story being told, too: The kid is weird, man: awkward, geeky, likes monster movies and comic books. You know the type. And the father? You know his type, too: distant, damaged, normalized; doesn’t really know how to connect with his kid. In Super 8, the kid’s a model-making weirdo and his dad is deputy sheriff.

The story ends the same way, though: they still wind up playing catch. No matter how different they are as people, the can come together as normal fathers and sons do.

(‘Playing catch,’ I don’t need to point out, is a metaphor. Though often a literal one! In Field of Dreams, they play catch. Literally! Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade? They ride off into the sunset together. Literally! You get the picture. Fathers and sons, finally seeing eye to eye.)

I’m an American. I grew up with these stories. They’re everywhere. They mean a lot to me. They resonate.

I’m also a geek. I grew up with those stories, too – how weird kids connect with their ‘normal’ authority figure parent-types. (Or normal kids and their weird parents, but that’s a slightly different kind of story.) Everyone comes to understand each other a little better. Ties are bound. These stories also mean a lot to me. They also resonate, y'know?

But you know what else I am?

Female.

The 2013 Arthur C. Clarke Shortlist: An Imaginary Judgement

There are lots of great pieces already about the Clarke Award. Strange Horizons has done a round-up or two that highlights some of this year's discussion. I think Chris Gerwel's piece comparing the Clarke discussion to the Hugo discussion is particularly interesting. To brutally summarise what I took out of it: for the Hugo awards, people blame the award. For the Clarke, people blame everything else.

I've already written about the Hugo awards, my imaginary ballot and why I, as a non-voter, need to shoulder a share of the 'blame' - although I do generally sympathise with the conclusion that there are some greater issues with the award as well.

For the Clarke, although I do agree that the world (that is, the universe of UK publishing) is badly flawed - and, for this discussion that means, "not publishing enough books by female authors" - I simply don't see how that excuses the judges from somehow generating an all-male shortlist. 

Before I get further in, please understand that I think the Arthur C. Clarke Award is the most prestigious prize in science fiction and, without a doubt, it does an amazing job of promoting science fiction to genre and non-genre readers. I like the fact that, not only does it provoke conversations like this, but it also encourages them. If I come across as more critical of the Clarke than I am of other awards, it is because I hold it to a higher standard.

I have read - and appreciated - many of the arguments that have been presented. That is: publishers, agents, readers, reviewers, authors, editors and retailers are all to blame for the lack of a single female author on the shortlist.

Yet... I still hold the judges responsible. 

The 2013 Hugo Shortlists: An Imaginary Ballot

The point of this isn't to beat a dead horse. I think Jonathan McCalmont and Chris Gerwel have both written very good posts summarising aspects of the discussion surrounding this year's Hugo Awards, and I recommend reading those. Although Jonathan's post was slightly derailed by the comments, I think the ultimate conclusion of his post was a surprisingly inspiring call to action: register, read, vote and discuss.

Last year I found the Hugo so demoralising that I didn't bother to vote this year - despite having every intention of going to the upcoming London-based Worldcon. Which means, by absenting myself, I am as much a part of this year's result as everyone that did vote. The system is troublesome in a lot of ways, but in this one aspect - having a say in the 2012/2013 results - I could have had a (tiny) impact... and I didn't. I feel surprisingly bad about that, and it has influenced my contribution (or, more importantly, lack thereof) to the ongoing debate.

Next year, I'll be registering, reading, voting and discussing. To quote the Emperor Kuzco: "Bring. It. On."

But, the shortlists are done, whether or not I had a say in them. I'm going to pretend I did do the right thing and vote, which means I've got my imaginary ballot to fill out. So, because I am a very serious imaginary voter, I'm going to try and follow best practice: I can cast votes for what I've actually read, I can only consider 2012 (especially important for the zine categories), I won't vote tactically or simply for my friends and I'll try to be thoughtful about what 'best' means in each category.

Let's see how that goes, shall we?

Week o' Filler: Goodreads

I accidentally joined Goodreads last month. Stop smirking, it really was an accident. I logged in to... something... trying to fix a typo in a Pandemonium title, and next thing I knew, it had sent invitations to everyone on Facebook. Evil.

Still, I've been screwing around, and here's what I like...

- Being able to tinker with the Pandemonium titles, and make sure the information is right. Cross i's and dot t's and all athat.

- Tracking my reading. For the past two years, I've kept a silly spreadsheet of everything I read. I don't know why. I figured 'data first, questions later'. (What did I learn? That reading 200 books for The Kitschies skews the numbers.) Goodreads is actually a pretty good platform for this particular kind of fun. So far, I've got 2013 up to date. If, say, in a few months, I'm still enjoying it, I'll import my reading from 2011 and 2012.

- Adding books. Apparently my reading taste is weird. I've had to add four books, which is pretty fun. 

Here's what I don't like...

- Star ratings. One of the reasons I rarely review on Amazon any more. My rule of the moment is that a book is either: '5 stars' or not, mostly because if it is a great book, I want to give it the equivalent of a thumbs up. I've lost my capacity to judge whether or not something is 3 or 4 or 2 or 3 or whatever.

What do you do? How do you rate books?

And how do you use Goodreads? What other fun stuff am I missing?

On Criticism: Pornokitsch, Memes and the Shadow of Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert, the eminent American film critic, died on Thursday night. He was seventy. As ill as he had been for the last decade, the news of his death was still shocking. I followed him on Twitter. I read his reviews. I read his last announcement, made the day before he died, that he was going to be slowing down in his reviewing going forward. It was still a shock. As of now: a world without Roger Ebert.

Movie criticism was, for maybe 20 years, the first form of criticism people encountered. Reading the Friday papers, with their reviews of the week's new releases, very often informed the weekend's activities. And even if one didn't get to the cinemas before the film left, or the movie one was interested in wasn't showing anywhere accessible, it would be on the shelves of the local video store in less than a year. Watching a film, and agreeing or disagreeing with the review of it one had read: well, that's critical engagement in its purest form.

The first form of criticism they encountered, I should qualify, that mattered. We were certainly all encouraged to engage critically with school texts, for example, but that was work. Engaging with movies, and with movie reviews - that was fun.

Nerveless, inane and a nuisance

"Well, my friends, one of the wants of the cities is a great bonfire of bad books and newspapers. We have enough fuel to make a blaze 200 feet high. Many of the publishing houses would do well to throw into the blaze their entire stock of goods. Bring forth the insufferable trash and put it into the fire and let it be known in the presence of God and angels and men that you are going  to rid your homes of the overtopping and underlying curse of profligate literature.

"The printing press is the mightiest agency on earth for good and for evil. The minister of the gospel standing in a pulpit has a responsible position, but I do not think it is as responsible as the position of an editor or publisher... 

"I have to tell you that the greatest blessing that ever came to the nations is that of an elevated literature, and the greatest scourge has been that of unclean literature. This last has its victims in all occupations and departments. It has helped to fill insane asylums and penitentiaries and alms-houses and dens of shame. The bodies of this infection lie in the hospitals and in the graves, while their souls are being tossed over into a lost eternity, an avalanche of horror and despair. The London plague was nothing to it. That counted its victims by thousands, but this modern pest has already shoveled its millions into the charnel house of the morally dead. The longest rail train that ever ran over the tracks was not long enough or large enough to carry the beastliness and the putrefaction which have been gathered up in bad books and newspapers in the last 20 years.

Amazon and Achieving the Moral Middle Ground

So here's a thing - not sure if it is blog-worthy or not, but if it isn't written, it won't happen. 

I had a really nice chat in a bookshop the other day. I was leering at Moleskines (Hobbit Moleskines, in fact, because that's how I roll), as was another guy. We chatted a bit about the notebooks - how we use them (or don't), how silly they are (but we get them anyway), how many we have (way too many), etc. Dude had 28 notebooks. Which sounds extreme, but then he explained that he has one for each project - whenever he's got a new scheme, he gets a new notebook. Awesome idea, and were I 1/8000th as organised, I'd follow suit. (My notebooks? I try to keep them magical and inviolate, but inevitably tear out pages, jot down to-do lists, etc. Ruined.)

Anyway, it was a silly conversation and I've had a thousand just like them in bookstores all over the world. Sometimes they happen with the staff. Sometimes with other customers. Sometimes at events. Hell, sometimes I even manage to have meaningful conversations with other readers at events that I've organised (for those of you that have seen me in full fret at one of our events, you know how rare that is...)

I've worked in bookstores on and off my entire life. As a kid, my mom would drop me off at the local used bookshop while she ran errands, and, three hours later, return to find me alphabetising things. My first paid part-time job was at a Barnes & Noble - they hired me because I was spending all my time there anyway; easier than training someone from scratch.

When I first moved to London, I earned my all-important pints-and-clubbing cash by working part time in a tiny campus bookstore. I pioneered a sales technique that involved blasting house music through the shop's tiny, tiny speakers and then flogging Rough Guides and Irvine Welsh to the wide-eyed students it attracted.

All of that is irrelevant, except to say that I've had thousands and thousands of conversations in bookstores with total strangers. Sometimes about books, sometimes about notebooks, sometimes about music or Arsenal or shoes or travel or post-structuralist interpretations of Houllebecq (ok, that last one is a lie). But, when it comes down to it, bookshops offer more than the serendipity of finding a good book - they also offer the chance to find a good conversation and, well, god alone knows where that could lead. 

(And no, I don't mean that, although I will grant that many glossy magazines all suggest that if you want to meet a quality romantic partner, go to a bookshop. It makes much more sense than the traditional 'grocery store' chat-up, which hasn't made sense since 1952.)

The only reason I'm even thinking this - much less writing it - and, eventually, maybe doing something - is because I chatted with a lovely guy about Moleskines for four minutes in a Blackwell's. (Incidentally, they're 2 for 3 right now, which makes them, in Moleskine terms, affordable.

Which is all a long-winded way of saying that I'm going to stop shopping on Amazon. I know there are better reasons to stop using the site: neo-Nazi taskmasters, troublesome working conditions, tax avoidance, hoarding data like it is going out of style... those are all strong, moral reasons.

But this is the selfish one I choose: I want to go to bookshops more. Not because I like books (which I do), but because I like people. If I go to more bookshops, I meet more people. And, scarily, if our bookshops go away, we not only lose lovely places filled with fascinating objects, we lose all the conversations we ever could've had within them. 

(Sadly, this won't stem to selling - more Pandemonium books sell on Amazon in a week than sell on all other platforms combined in a quarter. This isn't my money, we're a non-profit: I'm not going to hose our authors and our charity partner's proceeds.)

Kevin Lynn Helmick on What is Southern Gothic?

Earlier this year, we (Jared, in this case) got to blurb a novella for Blank Slate Press, Driving Alone by Kevin Lynn Helmick.

Blank Slate are doing consistently brilliant work, quietly turning out great stories from Midwestern authors (woohoo!). Now Driving Alone is out, so we asked Kevin to swing by and share a few words about what it means to write "Southern Gothic".

------

Jared requested that I explain to some of you there across the pond, just what is a Southern Gothic, I had to take a breath. You see I’m not from the American South. I grew up in the Mississippi River Valley true enough, but on the borders of Iowa, Missouri and Illinois, and that’s not South.

I now live, and have for many years, just north of Chicago, which a Louisiana bartender in South Padre Island, Texas was once quick to point out, “Oh, hell yer a god damn Canadian.” I laughed at that, even though there was an insult somewhere in her tone when she said it. That should give you some idea how most American Southerners feel about the rest of America, and how some might even feel about me introducing or describing Southern Gothic.

That’s alright, just the way it is.

David Bryher on Why "Genre" is Poison

A few years ago, shortly after I had jacked in a low-flying job in magazine publishing to go freelance, a friend asked me what I planned to write. “I have an idea for a novel or two,” I replied.

“Oh, yes? What kind of thing?”

“Fantasy,” I replied, and he frowned.

He wondered why I’d wanted to write in that genre – not because he thought it was bad, simply because it was a genre that didn’t appeal to him. As a genre, fantasy never chimed with him.

Oh, did I mention this friend writes Doctor Who? (Not all of it, just a few choice episodes.) So it might seem odd that he doesn’t like fantasy, yes? Ah, but. What do you think of when I say “fantasy”?

My friend and I didn’t talk much more about that idea. (Although I did mention a second idea, which he liked a lot: a woman falling in love with a man half her age via the medium of an online fantasy roleplaying game.) But I got the sense from what he said that he didn’t like things like elves and dwarves and magic swords – which is certainly what many people probably do think when I say “fantasy”. And (and I say this with the utmost respect to my friend) when many people start to picture elves and dwarves and magic swords, the gates of their mind shut tight and that is that is that. My fantasy idea didn’t have any of those things. Doctor Who doesn’t have any of those things. Ironically, the online gaming story idea was full of elves and dwarves and magic swords – and yet my friend liked that one more because he could see it was about a woman falling for the wrong man.

The Kitschies: 2012 Submissions by the Numbers

We've received a record number of submissions for The Kitschies for 2012, both in volume of books and number of publishers and imprints sending books to us. We're pleased as (rum) punch, as the award has continued to grow from year to year.

The first year of The Kitschies, Anne and I went through a shade under 70 books. This year, the two judging panels - Patrick Ness, Rebecca Levene and I for the literary side, Lauren O'Farrell, Gary Northfield and Ed Warren on the cover art - have been discussing more than two hundred entries.

Math is fun, so I've taken the liberty of putting together a few charts: