owlectomy

I biked the mile and a half to Z.'s house in costume. It was a Pikachu costume I'd bought at Target and I was glad for the visibility it lent me in the dark.

The shoes I needed to complete the look were my Italian leather-soled ones. Months earlier I had slipped down half a staircase in those shoes, but I hadn't stopped to consider what it would be like to pedal in them. My shoes slipped against the pedals, slipped off them. At one point I took off my shoes and strapped them to the rack; it was worse, in my socks. So determined was I to keep turning those wheels around that I didn't stop to think I should go home and change. It was only a mile and a half.

*

"You went to college in Canada, right? Is this what parties were like there?" M. asked me. By this point I had drunk half a cider and a nonalcoholic butterscotch soda.

"The thing is, I had severe social anxiety when I was in undergrad. So I didn't go to any parties."

"Oh, me too," M. said.

Later he marveled at the change of moving from Brooklyn to Ames. People put down Ames, when they do this; but it was rarely enough that I actually felt part of whatever mystique New York City has for outsiders. There are fewer art-house movies and worse vegetarian food. But for a part of me, the big city bustle feels like walking in the Broadway crowd, exhausted and panicky.

"It's like in a 19th century novel," I said, "When a character moves from London to the country to recover from a nervous breakdown."

This wasn't accurate; I was pretty well recovered, by that time. I was well enough to figure out that I might need someplace cheaper, quieter, lower-key, if I was to avoid turning up in the same place again. It felt accurate, to a first approximation.

*

I worked up the courage to ask Z. a favor. It turned out he wore my shoe size; it turned out he had a pair of sneakers he could lend me until Monday. I put my Italian shoes in the pannier on my bike. It was past eleven and in the good-byes people kept telling me to bike safe. The Saturday before Halloween, people would be drinking. The roads were dark and empty. The borrowed shoes clung fast to my pedals, all the way home.

I have so many questions about this story in the Guardian about the author of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies being taken to court by his publisher for turning in a manuscript that was not just three years late but also “not original to Smith, but instead is in large part an appropriation of a 120-year-old public-domain work."

Like... isn't Pride and Prejudice and Zombies ITSELF an appropriation of an old public-domain work?

Like... How is it possible to spend three years on a manuscript you're getting paid $4 million for, and turn in a worse book than Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter? I mean, sophomore problems, high expectations, I get this stuff, but we're talking about a bar you can almost just walk right over.

Like... $4 million, really!?

Well, it must be said that there are authors who are having bigger publisher problems than me.

So, the very morning after I complained about the chair in my office, an email went out to the listserv saying we could come to the English building to pick up one of the outgoing old chairs if we wanted. I took my measuring tape and found the tallest one (feeling slightly like a criminal casing the joint) and now I am satisfied.

I have also signed up for internet service. I am not exactly thrilled about that but I finally figured out that the root of the problem was very high latency; I was getting ping times at the slow end of dialup speeds. I am willing to admit that medium-speed internet is one of the things I won't compromise on.

"I can install it myself," I said to the ISP guy.

"I'm sure you can, it's not that hard," he said.

Never had I wanted so badly to say, "That wasn't a question."

I keep reading Carol Bly's "The Passionate, Accurate Story" and then getting myself tied up in knots thinking I've got to write stories about global warming and nuclear weapons and whatever.

It's not that I don't want to write stories about global warming and nuclear weapons and whatever, but they kind of have to be subtle enough that I can respect them, and also not just retreads of Paolo Bacigalupi.

I'm already dealing with a terrible and insidious level of perfectionism, where I can't even get to the stage of having an idea for something unless I can feel like it's going to be fantastic right from the beginning. So when I put on top of that, "OH, AND YOU HAVE TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO SOLVE THE WORLD'S PROBLEMS" - I mean, that's nonsense, that's just another avoidance mechanism.

And actually "Ramblewood Underground" - it's not all the way there yet in terms of storytelling and story structure but in terms of being a passionate accurate story, it IS very much the sort of thing that I want to be writing, with characters who don't have chemical-weapons-testing jobs to quit like the guy in Carol Bly's story but who exist in the world as it is with all its problems, who can be engaged and compassionate people even if they can't solve those problems.

So that's my challenge to myself: to try to find my way toward stories that I care about, that are important to me, while lowering my standards a hell of a lot when it comes to them being politically and aesthetically perfect.

Things That Need Doing

1) Buy a bicycle, which would make everything else easier, except that I think the store's going to need to order me a different size of whichever bike I decide on. (I test-rode a bunch of things yesterday and the only good fit is a bike I'm still kind of lukewarm about.)

2) Buy a coax cable so I can get cable and a USB wireless adaptor so I can set up my desktop. (I hate to do this while I'm still getting really bad internet speeds, but at least the desktop would have better ergonomics for typing.)

3) Go to the university to do my payroll paperwork and my sexual harassment training

4) Get a new bank account at a bank that has local branches

That's not bad, except that it will be raining all day and I really do need to get my payroll paperwork done before the deadline.

I am still thinking about this essay, now several years old, which constrasts the kishoutenketsu structure that characterizes traditional Chinese and Japanese narratives with a traditional western plot structure that relies on a conflict-driven plot characterized by a protagonist trying, failing, and eventually succeeding at something.

I don't think it's necessarily useful to divide things so neatly. Kishoutenketsu literally means something like 'arising, development, turn, resolution,' and this idea of a 'turn' or a 'twist' is broad enough to encompass Eastern and Western narratives, high-conflict narratives and low-conflict ones. My book on writing (very cheesy and commercial, and certainly not low-conflict) Boys Love novels says that you should use kishoutenketsu as a plot model. But then I think about a Yoshimoto Banana short story that I read several years ago. The viewpoint character is a girl who lives next door to a boy who's well-off but whose family life seems mysterious and sad. One day, circumstances lead her to understand the boy's family life much better; then he moves away.

By the standards of the conflict-plot model, this is a bad story. The girl isn't really driven by her efforts to help the boy or find out more about his family life; these are just things that happen. (If you were hung up on the conflict-plot model, you'd say she gets things too easily.) But the story works because really, there are two kinds of questions we're asking through the course of a narrative that generate tension or suspense. There's wanting to know what's going to happen next; and there's wanting to understand what's going on now. If a story like this one works, it works because we feel like we understand a little more about the boy and his family; and it works because we feel like that knowledge is meaningful in the context of the story; and maybe we feel like we understand a little more about the ways in which families can be sad or cruel or complicated. It's not driven by success or failure, but by revelation. Or epiphany.

This is where the Western/Eastern thing breaks down, because epiphany-driven storytelling has been the model for Anglosphere short stories for the last hundred years. And even if we think of Hollywood blockbusters, even in hugely conflict-driven movies, it's often the epiphanies that generate the most resonance -- isn't "I am your father" the key moment of any of the Star Wars movies? Even very traditional conflict-plot stories are driven by much more than the conflict, by much more than the protagonist's success or failure -- they're driven by a situation with mysteries that need to be understood. And a lot of that is lost when we try to cram stories into a conflict-plot model that reduces events to a try-fail cycle.

This is true even when it's really just a conflict-plot model with a Freudian overlay: we've got to dig up the hidden trauma, search out the mystery at the center of the problem, so that we can beat the Big Bad. But even then, I think it reflects something important -- the idea that we'll succeed not by being the cleverest or the strongest, but the ones with the deepest understanding of things. Perhaps, if we're lucky, by being the ones with the most empathy.

But there are also stories where understanding things better doesn't really get you anything, except for understanding things better. These are the stories that often feel aggressively anti-narrative to me, in the same way that Japanese fiction often used to feel anti-narrative to me when I started reading it. And at worst, these kinds of stories can feel meandering and pointlessly sad. But at best, I can relate better to the people in these stories: people who don't know what will make them happy; people who don't have much of anything concrete to fight for or fight against; people whose action in the world often consists in watching and waiting and hoping to get a better understanding of themselves and what's going on around them. These are the stories that say, if the conflict-plot model doesn't work, if you're not going to win or lose at life, what else matters? Where else can we build meaning, or find meaning? The epiphany story is bigger than an assumption about the cruel and brutal truths at the center of the universe. Kindness can be a revelation; the moments in Miyazaki's movies of quiet and natural beauty come like revelations, even in a movie as violent as Princess Mononoke.

The conflict-plot story is fundamentally a story about how you can win as long as you have enough strength or guts or will. That's not my story; it's not most people's story, I think. I want a story that decenters its protagonists, a little. A story with enough room for the cruelty of the universe and also its beauty. A story where, in the middle of all the other conflicts that are going on, the protagonist can sit down and breathe in the fresh air and see things at a different angle than they did the night before.

I got the ebook for Neoreaction a Basilisk by Phil Sandifer because I backed the Kickstarter; the book should be widely released next year.

This is kind of a weird book. It's a book of philosophy-as-horror that takes as its organizing principle the internet "rationalist" movement, and the neoreactionary and alt-right movements, and the ways in which they intersect; but it loops out to consider Thomas Ligotti, China Mieville, Franz Fanon, Paradise Lost, Hannibal, and especially William Blake.

As a work of philosophy, it is unusual in that it is thoughtful, accessible, and well-written. Having read a couple of the "Philosophy and [Arbitrary popular mass-media product]" books, I have to say that it's refreshing for a writer to take Arbitrary Popular Mass-Media Product seriously in a way that doesn't seem like a condescending "Hey, kids! What does Hannibal have to teach us about [Arbitrary Philosophy 101 Topic]?" - and it's maybe still more refreshing that the book deliberately turns away from the impulse to tie things up neatly, arguing (correctly, I think) that rationality needs empathy and imagination if it's to get beyond a small and circumscribed vision of the world, and stepping away from the bounds of what we can logic out necessarily means embracing uncertainty.

I'm not sure how much appeal the book would have for somebody who didn't have at least a little bit of train-wreck-curiosity about the main topics of the book, and if you do have a little bit of train-wreck-curiosity you probably already backed this guy's kickstarter. But I am really glad I read it.

(And it pointed me to China Mieville's essay on social sadism, which I must now track down.)

N.B: Sandifer is also the author of Guided by the Beauty of Their Weapons, on Theodore Beale and the recent Hugo debacle. I recommend it as well.

Charred eggplant and walnut pesto pasta salad - I dislike eggplant unless it's cooked just right, but this was quite delicious and not as bad as I expected with the prep time -- though it was challenging to handle the pasta, the pesto, and the eggplant all at once.

For my Tony viewing snack I made a fruit compote with strawberries, cherries, ginger, and a little lime juice. Served it over ice cream. Actually I didn't let it cool down enough before I ate, so I served it over melted ice cream, but it was still delicious.

We're almost at that time of year when I want to eat nothing but avocado on toast. Luckily I do have some avocados. I'm looking forward to having central air...

"Most YA fiction is grown up fiction in disguise", Anthony McGowan writes in the Guardian.

As usual for thinkpieces on YA, it's not a great article - it's long on generalities and short on specifics (Which teenagers aren't reading which books? What styles or themes or characters belong in adult literature but not YA?) - and ultimately, these are the problems that we get into when we treat teenagers as a monolithic group. As Farah Mendlesohn has argued, when we say "the average teenager won't like this book," we're often correct -- but we're excluding a lot of the most passionate and dedicated readers.

Young Adult literature, like children's literature, is tricky because you have to manage several different kinds of difference from adult readers. There's reading fluency -- and while a lot of kids are reading at an adult-airport-bestseller level by the time they're twelve or so, especially if they're economically advantaged, a lot of kids aren't. There's real-world knowledge, which can make political thrillers and historical fiction dull or confusing for many teenagers. And there's emotional maturity and experience. All of these things develop at different rates for different readers.

Like a lot of children in my generation (I went to high school in the late '90s), I didn't read a lot of YA in my teens - I read a lot of middle-grade fiction, and after that I mostly read adult science fiction and fantasy, because intellectually I was ready for adult fiction, but I was not ready emotionally for very nuanced and complicated romantic relationships, or books about mid-life crises and parenting. Even as a high-school senior reading Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood, with its college freshman protagonist, it felt like a world that I didn't belong to, a world that was still a little too dangerous for me to enter. I wish that young me had had the kind of YA that McGowan sniffs at for being too grown-up for teen readers; I think a lot of it would have been just right for me. But there have been books that could be appreciated by both adults and teens in the 19th century, when it was very common to read Dickens or Hawthorne out loud to the whole family; in the 1980s and 90s, when Stephen King was the most popular author among teenagers even if he was too gory to be published as YA; and I do think lots of those books that are being published as YA now would have been published as adult back then. I don't think that's necessarily a problem. Books will find their readers, whatever section of the library they're placed in.

But I also think it's very important to make sure that every reader can find the book that's right for them. There's an awful lot of concern over boys who don't read - and I don't think it's misplaced, but it's hard to know whether it's a publishing problem or a cultural issue or what. (The push to take pleasure reading out of schools makes me tear my hair out, but as far as I know that's more an American problem.) There's not a lack of books about boys; there's not a lack of books that should appeal to boys who don't particularly like to read; on the other hand there IS a lack of books about people of color, about people with disabilities, about trans people. (There is far more, and better-written, LGBT YA than there was even ten years ago, but it's still an issue.) A lot of mainstream YA lit suffers from the sitcom thing where everyone is at least middle-class enough that lack of money is never a real problem. I don't want to let publishing off the hook too easily.

It's just that, if teenagers aren't reading enough, then it's not "Life: An Exploded Diagram" (the author's example of a YA book too mature for YA) that's at fault.

When a stylistically challenging, thematically mature, or just plain odd YA book gets published - can we see that as a victory for the teenagers who need those books, and not as a loss for everybody else? Can we aim for a publishing ecosystem that represents all teenagers, including those who aren't reading fluently, including those who have needs in themes, styles, and subject matter that don't always get considered? And if we're worried about kids who don't read -- as we should be, I think -- can we look for solutions that go beyond the books that get published?