Read for Pleasure

Pam Rosenthal: The Edge of Impropriety (February Book Club)

2009-06-14T17:45:00.029-04:00

• On Amazon
• On IndieBound
• Author's website

Pam Rosenthal's The Slightest Provocation made me an instant fan. I love both literary fiction and genre romance, and Rosenthal's special blend is intelligent romance with a literary technique and a dense style of storytelling that make for an absorbing read.

The Edge of Impropriety, however, is mixed for me. It's smart and provocative, and Rosenthal's writing style is always a delight, but the romance engaged me more cerebrally than emotionally.

The Edge of Impropriety details an affair between Marina Wyatt, widowed countess, trashy novelist and sexually liberated woman, and Jasper Hedges, fuddy-duddy antiquarian and guardian of a niece and "nephew" (Jasper’s unacknowledged son and close friend to Marina). Marina and Jasper plan a purely physical affair, but that compartmentalization founders as secrets about their pasts are gradually revealed.

Lovely moments

Marina is secretive from the start. Even before she's identified as a leading part in the romance, we hear third-hand, muted speculation on some of her secrets--a third party in her marriage and possible Irish origins. But she can be forthright in her inner monologue, and it’s there that we get some of those lovely Rosenthal moments that breathe life into the characters.

Rosenthal doesn't waste words but drops the reader directly into the characters' heads. I love the way that her dense writing slows me down and focuses my full attention on the page. For example, a very few words lay out Marina’s marriage and emotional landscape, both her and Jasper's households, and the story's slant on genre conventions (relegating a dashing young potential hero to the role of sidekick, and highlighting the heroine's lack of youthful ardor or innocence).

... despite his perfect manners, splendid waistcoats, and sunny good nature, Sir Anthony Hedges had turned out to want love--the passionate, heartfelt stuff--in a way that touched and rather baffled her.

Nor would it hurt, she expected, if he had someone to help pay for the waistcoats.

But as Marina couldn't give him either thing--and as she'd surprised herself by discovering that she liked him--she'd offered her friendship and advised him to make the best use of the Season by achieving a good marriage.

Rejecting his advances had been surprisingly exhilarating. Making her own choices was still a new thing for her, after all her years on the receiving end of other people's--of men's--choices.

Glancing up at the bright green ivy twining ’round the windows, she preened in the sunlight filtering through the tiers of Belgian lace. Still in her loose chintz morning gown, she allowed a deep, uncorseted breath to sweep through her waist and belly until it made shuddery little aches in her thighs. Souvenir of last night’s encounter. Reminder of the pleasures and independence she’d achieved. Good to keep it that way.

Time & distance

Another Rosenthal signature is that history is part of the present—not simply through flashbacks but in the characters’ streams of consciousness. In The Slightest Provocation these time slips explicate the central couple’s history together, and demonstrate both the intimacy and the conflict between them. In Impropriety, though, I find the effect more distancing; Marina soliloquizes so much during sex that I half-suspect she’s bored.

To be sure, it’s a tricky plot to pull off. The relationship conflict involves keeping secrets and withholding emotional intimacy despite physical intimacy—a style that also kept much of the emotional development under the surface, perhaps buried in Marina's welter of words. After all, the central characters are a born lecturer and a writer who never turns off her inner editor until in the last few pages she finally

thought that she’d thought enough for one day.

Edge of impatience

The Edge of Impropriety’s themes are interesting as always, and I enjoy the way Rosenthal straddles the line between conventional genre romance forms and more experimental literary structures. I’m a staunch fan of Rosenthal's writing, and Marina and Jasper are wonderfully individualistic--no cardboard cutouts here--but it took me most of the book to get invested in the central problems of the relationship. So:

A for intelligence, A-/B+ for a distinctive writing style that didn't quite carry the book for me, and C for compellingness. Which yields that safest of grades, the overall B+.

Read instead

If I've convinced you not to read this book, I sort of wish I hadn't. But what could be better than a Rosenthal... but another Rosenthal? I’ve already professed my love for The Slightest Provocation. Read it!

This review is part of the February Book Club’s debut. From most to least enthusiastic, the four participants' reviews are:

Tumperkin’s rave review
Meriam’s rave with reservations review
RfP’s reservations but still a fan review
Jessica’s not too thrilled review

June Jordan: We are the ones we have been waiting for

2008-12-03T18:00:00.010-05:00

Passion: New Poems, 1977-1980

• On Amazon
• On IndieBound

• Author's website
• Audio

I don't think many people realize that a poem by Jamaican-American activist June Jordan shaped the rhetoric of the US presidential election. Specifically, the last line of her "Poem for South African Women":

we are the ones we have been waiting for.

Sound familiar? It's been a rallying cry for a number of groups, including a Hopi prayer for the new millenium. Alice Walker took the line as the title of her 2006 collection of essays on activism, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness. And all last year, it was in Senator Obama's campaign speeches.

The poem

The poem isn't about party politics, but it's well suited to a political message about emotion, inspiration, and transformation. Here's the full text, from the June Jordan website. Take a read; it's not long. (And then, to segue from sublime to ridiculous, watch the crazy political ad after it :)

Poem for South African Women
June Jordan, 1980

Our own shadows disappear as the feet of thousands
by the tens of thousands pound the fallow land
into new dust that
rising like a marvelous pollen will be
fertile
even as the first woman whispering
imagination to the trees around her made
for righteous fruit
from such deliberate defense of life
as no other still
will claim inferior to any other safety
in the world

The whispers too they
intimate to the inmost ear of every spirit
now aroused they
carousing in ferocious affirmation
of all peaceable and loving amplitude
sound a certainly unbounded heat
from a baptismal smoke where yes
there will be fire

And the babies cease alarm as mothers
raising arms
and heart high as the stars so far unseen
nevertheless hurl into the universe
a moving force
irreversible as light years
traveling to the open eye

And who will join this standing up
and the ones who stood without sweet company
will sing and sing
back into the mountains and
if necessary
even under the sea:

we are the ones we have been waiting for.

I find it very evocative, and it's quite brilliant as an activist poem. It opens with multitudes transforming their land, and closes with still more choosing to join in; and so much of the imagery is about kindling life through imagination or action. The final "We are the ones we have been waiting for" reinforces the sense of a massive community and of a long-developing historic moment. And though it's an activist piece, there's no cynical political commentary; it's heart-on-the-sleeve stuff, inspiring rather than accusing.

(The Poetry Foundation has audio. I don't read the cadence at all as Jordan does, so it's interesting to hear her dramatic reading, and the MP3 includes the Sweet Honey in the Rock a capella song based on the last line.)

The soundbites

So, did June Jordan's poem really shape the rhetoric of the election? I think so.

Consider the response as soon as Obama's speeches started getting serious attention. That closing "We are the ones we’re waiting for" carried an obvious charge, but no one seemed to agree on its meaning. The "we" language, and the blatant call to arms, were so perfectly suited to campaign speech that they could be co-opted for any purpose.

That is, until Oprah dropped the "We" and proclaimed Obama "The One". Overnight, the phrase came to represent hubris and celebrity mania. "The One" and "We are the ones" even became a wacky ad that apparently depicted Obama as the anti-Christ. I'm not up on Armageddonology, so judge for yourself:

(Yes, that's Charlton Heston as Moses!)

Elections being more given to soundbites than poetry, I thought "The One" would alter the meaning of "We are the ones" forever. But in their final election night speeches, both Senator Obama and Senator McCain deliberately moved the rhetoric back from "I" to "we":

Obama: This is your victory. And I know you didn't do this just to win an election. And I know you didn't do it for me.

McCain: I urge all Americans who supported me to join me in not just congratulating him, but offering our next president our good will and earnest effort to find ways to come together....

No one on either campaign ever mentioned June Jordan, and there would have been plenty of reconciliatory language even without her poem, but she certainly shaped a major plank for both campaigns. And Jordan herself may be gone, but Alice Walker's still wielding her words. The day after the election, Walker published An Open Letter to Barack Obama. She ended with:

We are the ones we have been waiting for.

In Peace and Joy,
Alice Walker

Two poems, for a change of pace

2008-11-29T23:45:00.004-05:00

Q. What's shorter¹ than a short story²? And more elliptical³, layered with symbolism⁴, and interesting to read aloud⁵?

A. Why, a poem⁶.

¹In some instances.
²See ¹. This obviously excludes epic poems and short-short stories.
³That's an exaggeration, of course; my next post provides an example, and the post after that a counter-example.
⁴Which isn't strictly necessary to the form, but it's fun when it is.
⁵To tell the truth, some short stories are much more fun to read aloud than some poems.
⁶Or not. See ¹ through ⁵.

Anyway, I've been rediscovering poetry in a minor way. My poetry books have been in storage for yonks, and until a few months ago I'd have said I didn't really miss them--but no, I do want that box back after all.

Believe it or not, the US presidential election reminded me of one poet I hadn't read since university. And another came up in an article about strange book titles like The Billionaire's Seductive Party Planner's Gigantic Secret. I won't turn this into a poetry blog (though stranger topics have been known to surface here), but I have two poems to get out of my system before returning to my regularly unscheduled programming.

Stay tuned, true believers.

What is a bodice ripper?

2008-10-09T07:00:00.015-04:00

Earlier this year, archaeologist Martin Rundkvist announced the discovery of a bona fide bodice ripper. (See silver thing at left. Surprisingly tame, isn't it?)

I should qualify that it was probably intended as a bodice lacer

that women used to lace a string or a ribbon through the lace holes of their bodices. They're usually about 7 cm long, often made out of silver with various kinds of decoration or spiral-twisted. They could be dull-pointed as they weren't intended to pierce fabric.

But surely many a lacing pin's been used for ripping bodices asunder, releasing buoyant bounties... in short, for unbosoming.

The grave's a fine and private place

Even the pin's location suggests illicit bodice-opening shenanigans. The pin probably dates to the 18th Century, but it was discovered at a Viking boat grave dating to 800-1000 AD. A little archaeological imagination makes the connection: Rundkvist surmises that three hundred years ago a Swedish lass lingered at the grave site with her bodice gaping. Apparently lovers have frequented graves for a long, long time.

Reinterpreting romance novel cover art

So what does this mean for the literary bodice ripper? Romance novels have a long tradition of lurid covers; the older novels in the genre often featured a bare-chested man ripping open the bodice of a stunned-looking woman. Or should I say, apparently ripping open. If the bodice ripper is really a bodice lacer, that puts a new complexion on the matter.

Consider the Valerie Sherwood cover below (left). In light of this new information, the man is not ripping off the woman’s gown but holding it on--for lack of a lacing pin. The Penelope Neri cover similarly shows a gentleman attempting to rectify a wardrobe malfunction. And Sandra Hill's Viking's prodigious digit? Likely the universal sign for "your pin's coming loose", much like the modern "XYZ" or "examine your zipper".

(Thanks to the Smart Bitches for their trove of covers.)
By these lights, these books have been done a, ahem, grave injustice. Bodice rippers? More like bodice savers!

More bodice ripper archaeology

See the full-size image and explanation at the excellent Aardvarchaeology blog. Rundkvist also gave a warm welcome to several "bodice ripper authors", and later had a career crisis and was advised to go into the bear-pelt ripper business.

More details on the excavation are in Antiquity v. 79 no. 303 (March 2005).

Joanne Harris: Jigs & Reels: Stories

2008-09-30T23:55:00.024-04:00

• On Amazon
• Author's website

I'd previously read Joanne Harris’ Chocolat and Gentlemen & Players: both intelligent novels and meticulously crafted, but I find her voice drones a bit at that length. However, I'm delighted to report that the stories in Jigs & Reels are tightly-written and varied. Harris' style remains quiet (with a few exceptions), but her interesting ideas take center stage in the shorter format, and I enjoy her light use of fantasy and horror as commentary.

A few of the stories retell fairytales or cynically predict the future; most have a creepy touch of the paranormal. They’re all direct in style, focusing on curious observations and unusual characters. ("Suburban witches, defiant old ladies, ageing monsters, suicidal Lottery winners, wolf men, dolphin women and middle-aged manufacturers of erotic leatherwear", says the cover).

A variety of central ideas

Most of Harris’ stories develop a central idea or character; few seem moody or experimental. The Little Mermaid and The Ugly Sister both rework fairytales into stories in which a woman lives according to the way others see her:

For a moment I tried to conceive of not being an Ugly Sister. Ugly is a word I've dragged behind me all my life; it defines who I am. Without it, what am I? The thought made me shiver.

The stranger saw my expression. "These things are just part of the roles we play," he said.

I particularly like the way Harris examines the Cinderella fairytale’s caricatures. Did the step-sisters need to be ugly, unkind, and undeserving? Or could all that drama be ordinary family friction, exaggerated to provide a more saintly, suffering Cinderella and a detestable pair of villains?

Also in a sentimental vein, Faith and Hope go Shopping is the tale of two elderlies on the lam--and the dreams they spin around a pair of red shoes and a copy of Lolita. In contrast, Eau de Toilette gives a stomach-turning olfactory tour of 18th-century court dress, while Waiting for Gandalf is a sting-in-the-tail story about middle-aged role-playing gamers.

Not a showy stylist

Harris' matter-of-fact tone works surprisingly well for such strange subject matter. Her even delivery helps persuade me of a perfectly ordinary reality populated by idiosyncratic characters. As Harris puts it:

they all think of themselves as perfectly normal, however unconventional their lifestyle. My suburban witches choose Bella Pasta for their high-school reunion and agonize about their weight; my dolphin woman falls in love with a man who is bad for her, just like any other woman, and my Ugly Sister, after three hundred years of being the villain of the piece, still only wants her prince….

This juxtaposition of the stodgy and the fantastical took me by surprise in several stories set in a conservative, old-fashioned England. For example, Gastronomicon (a Lovecraftian pastiche) introduces an ancient, exotic netherworld into an unadventurous domestic life. A seemingly dull housewife takes a few risks to spice up the dinner table, and the setting turns from humdrum to hair-raising. (Jasminembla has an excerpt.)

Several of these stories share similar timing; perhaps Harris overuses that moment when the worm turns. But the twist works more often than not. Sometimes I'm disappointed that the obvious solution is the answer, but often I feel the surprise, or I enjoy the shift in the story's atmosphere.

Overall, the collection has some great ideas, though a few stories seem underdeveloped or flat. I particularly appreciate the unusual combination of weird and accessible that distinguishes the best of the stories.

Grade: B+

More by Harris

I haven’t fallen head-over-heels for any of Harris’ books, but they’re smart and they engage my curiosity. I have one more on my list: the Victorian-set Sleep, Pale Sister, whose blurb claims "a powerful, atmospheric and blackly gothic evocation of Victorian artistic life." See the description on Harris’ website.

Some of the Jigs & Reels stories revisit St Oswald’s Grammar School for Boys--the setting for Harris’ murder-and-identity mystery Gentlemen & Players. G&P is a good, if rather cold, read. The relationships of the faculty and students are sketched precisely, and the villain’s point of view interrupts strategically whenever the book verges on becoming cozy. I actually prefer G&P to the far better-known Chocolat.

1940s noir: Go ogle an armful of trouble

2008-09-08T11:16:00.056-04:00

Lady, That's My Skull has some wonderful images from a '40s pulp fiction magazine,

Women In Crime (June 1946), a semi-exploitative magazine for male readers in the vein of "True Detective Stories".

The first caption sets the tone perfectly: "A Red-Headed Woman Is An Arm Full of Trouble!" There's also a dangerous woman with a high-pitched giggle, a dark sisterly conspiracy, and a stock woman-who-screams-on-cue. There's even a love-triangle Whirlpool of Death, which reminds me of the 1940s Harlequin thrillers I mentioned a few months ago. (Remember Maelstrom: A Brutal Saga of Love and Violence?)

I'll tease you with a couple of images, but do check out the full-size versions on Lady, That's My Skull. The original captions are priceless.

I love the photo of the couple having an affair. It's so openly but indirectly sexual. The lover doesn't have to stare at her breasts; between her shirt and her gaze, she does it all herself. Imagine the magazine editors chortling over it.

Worth a thousand words

Some of the photos are remarkably evocative; I can invent all kinds of lurid backstories. One caption is particularly Maltese Falconesque:

"You got a nice build, kid," Nick said eyeing her up and down. Then he handed her the package. "You ain't so bad yourself," Joyce smiled.

You don't have to be a black-and-white film buff to recognize that noir trope, the flawed protagonist--usually a man. You know there's often a woman involved in his downfall. She’s a type, their pose is a type, and their repartee's a type. You know as soon as she left the room, Nick whistled admiringly and said, "That's some dame."

I often like that female "type" as much as the male characters do. Is it because she gives as good as she gets? Because she's quick with a comeback and not ashamed to ogle a man? Yes to all that, but I especially like that interaction when it sets up a potential tug-of-war. In noir, the protagonist is gradually enmeshed in something he can’t escape. Will the woman be part of that? Will they reel each other in? Will they struggle against each other as well as the external plot? Will one get the other in hot water, and the other be a fool for love?

All that from a photo, a caption, and a love of The Maltese Falcon. Tropes are so great.

(Found via The Cultural Gutter.)

Book recommendations & my crappy memory

2008-08-30T23:55:00.008-04:00

A new article by Aaker, Drolet, and Griffin in the Journal of Consumer Research¹ says our memories are less reliable for experiences that provoke mixed emotions. We tend to remember our feelings as more definite than they were, and over time we forget the intensity of our initial mixed feelings.

I can think of a number of implications for marketing. But for us consumers, do we trick ourselves into remembering each book as all feel-good or all chills, and pure gold or utter tripe? Should we only recommend books we've read recently?

Mixed might as well be "meh"

Aaker et al. focused partly on responses to media (videos designed to evoke happy or mixed feelings), so the experiments should have some relevance to fiction. I have mixed reactions to a lot of books; Aaker et al.’s experiments found that many people had mixed emotions about experiences immediately afterward. I know I’ve misremembered books as more solidly good or bad than they really were; Aaker et al.’s subjects did much the same, later remembering their feelings as more black-or-white or "unipolar".

But some things can’t be assessed by introspection; an experimental setting is required. For instance, the experiments found that mixed feelings tend to fade until people don’t clearly recall their initial reaction. If that’s true of reading, then:

My memory shifts books from "Mixed" reactions (often authors I would try again) into "Didn't leave an impression" (usually the end of the road). I'm probably missing out on some interesting authors.
My memory of which books didn't excite me is useless—it's a mishmash of meh and mixed reactions.

When books are like crack

Aaker et al. hypothesize that mixed emotions create a sense of conflict, and that people unaccustomed to cultural conflict (specifically Anglo-Americans) forget their mixed emotions to avoid or resolve that conflict. They do recognize some weaknesses in their hypothesis: they note that "not all people feel conflicted when experiencing mixed emotions". Still, I’d like to see them test some completely different hypotheses that don’t assume mixed = conflict = bad.

What if sometimes readers seek that conflict? I enjoy books that mix happy with sad. If a book disturbs me as much as it attracts, I might not race to pick up that author's next book… but then again, I might. Isn't that partly why we describe books as "crack"? They're terrible and wonderful, and that mixed reaction is part of the attraction? How about an experiment that assesses whether people are stimulated by mixed-affect media, and whether they come back for more?

Old not-so-favorites

Here's another angle. Why do so many of us seek out old books we haven't read in years? Logic says that books we read when young, particularly books we don't remember clearly, might not be the most interesting to us today. So why the interest?

Under Aaker et al.'s hypothesis, perhaps older books seem more definite. Good or bad, maybe the voices seem more distinct. I'm sure that's part of the explanation, but I'll also make another pitch for my hypothesis of attraction/repulsion. After all, look at the Smart Bitches’ Help a Bitch Out requests: many are seeking books that both horrify and delight the requester and the site's readership. I'd love to see research on what makes a work so bad it's good. Better yet, I'd love to be one of the experimental subjects. Imagine what I would get to watch and read.

Sources

¹ Jennifer Aaker, Aimee Drolet, and Dale Griffin (2008). "Recalling Mixed Emotions". Journal of Consumer Research 35(2):268–278.

News releases and short summaries: e! Science News, Medical News Net, Science Daily

St Martin's gives away 1,000 romances

2008-08-21T08:00:00.003-04:00

If you don't know about LibraryThing's Early Reviewers program, each month publishers offer advance copies of upcoming books. Hundreds of LibraryThingers compete for 10 to 30 copies of each book.

This month St Martin's Press has upped the ante with 1,000 free copies of Lori Handeland's November '08 release, Any Given Doomsday. You can also barter your email address for a short story "prequel" called In The Beginning.

I've never seen a romance in the Early Reviewers program, and never this many copies of one book. St Martin's seems to be experimenting lately. (They also ran the June e-book giveaway of Julia Spencer-Fleming's mystery series.)

Any Given Doomsday looks like an amped-up variation on Handeland's supernatural thriller romances. I've read some of her earlier books, which were compact and character-oriented--much like category romance. They're definitely paranormal romance rather than urban fantasy. The formula wore thin for me after a couple books--I enjoyed her writing more before I glommed her back list. However, from the synopsis, Any Given Doomsday looks more thriller-ish; there's a save-the-world angle that could change the feel of her work.

LibraryThing's Early Reviewers program has been growing steadily; publishers offer more books and more copies every month. I'm glad they're increasing the giveaways and expanding into romance. If you're a romance reader on LibraryThing, throw your hat in the ring for the book or sell your email address to get the prequel.

E-books: I'm a newfangled old-fashioned girl

2008-08-07T16:00:00.012-04:00

(Sony Reader photo from adrianhon)

For the last six months I've been trying e-books from the library. Initially I read on computer and phone. I didn't like the experience, and I all but stopped reading e-books. Then I borrowed a Sony Reader. Voilà, suddenly e-books work for me.

It's a revelation how important the technology is, and how tricky it is to research. Other people's advice doesn't help; nor does a five-minute test-drive in a store. It's not only about where I read, at what time of day, or on what platform. Far more important is how I read: how many words I see at a time, and how the "pages" turn or scroll.

Many libraries provide e-books for download; only a few loan out physical e-reader gizmos loaded with e-books. Based on my experience, both e-publishers and device-makers would benefit from loaner programs. I wouldn't have tried e-books without the library's simple package of options (and zero cost). I wouldn't have persisted and found a technology that works for me if I hadn't been able to borrow friends' devices.

Right now, here's where I am with e-books.

I'm not sure about 'em... on the computer

I like the convenience of downloading e-books at any time of night. But reading on the computer has one unfixable problem and a few small hassles.

There’s no fixing the basic problem: I hate reading on a backlit computer screen. I do that all day already. Enough.
Bulk. I don’t take a laptop to bed. It and I tend to damage each other during the night.
The software is all right, but DRM is a hassle and library checkout rules vary with the format.

Adobe Digital Editions plays nicely with the library checkout system: I can return a book early (which frees up my account to borrow more e-books). Mobipocket sometimes hassles me to re-download a license file, and doesn't allow early returns. No early returns? E-books' strength is instant gratification, yet I have to wait weeks to download another? That's slower than the hold queue for the library's physical book—or waiting for the brick-and-mortar store to open.

I won't read 'em… on phones

It took me a while to realize how the phone was changing my reading experience. I've tried Blackberry, iPhone, and an old smartphone, and the small screen fundamentally changes the way I read. It creates a more linear experience of the book, limits my interaction with the text, and does a number on my appreciation of the work.

It can work; some people enjoy reading on the iPhone. Maybe someday I’ll get with the program. But so far the screen size sinks the technology for me. It makes for an awkward pacing: I want a certain amount of text showing at a time, and I don't want to scroll down or flip pages too often. I read fast, so I have to scroll down continuously. Normally that's the way I read email, not the way I read novels—for good reason, it turns out. It feels like the Star Wars opening, with the backstory crawling steadily up the screen. That's fine for two minutes, but hours on end?

I thought I would adjust, or it would be all right if I only read on the phone during my commute, but no. I stopped reading on the phone.

Two things I did like:

Always having a book with me. At first I would pull out my phone to read when desperate. At the moment I'm back to just reading email and news. Maybe I'll come around again.
Mobipocket’s Over the Air e-bookstore worked smoothly on my Blackberry.

I love 'em… on the Sony Reader

This device was a breath of fresh air after reading on my phone. It's the first (sustained) good experience I've had with e-books.

It’s not backlit. Oh, what a difference! And I like the cover with integrated light.
I can see much more text at a time. The size of the screen is a better fit for my reading style and pace.
It's the size of a paperback. Much less bulky than I'd expected.
I can read my library downloads.
The page turns were slow but predictable, so I could get into a rhythm.
I can put other documents on it. For free.

I wish I liked reading on my phone so I could consolidate devices. I suspect I'm old-fashioned in my yen for "page-size" chunks of text. I wonder what permutations of device and format I haven't tried, and whether they would make a difference. But like a commenter on my previous post, I find the Sony really does replace paper, and that could be a life changer. Especially if it ever goes wireless.

In summary, I'm a believer again… but only after trying some expensive devices. I'd like to try other dedicated e-book readers—the Cybook and the iLiad (which lets you read and write, and has wireless). I'm not sure yet where my personal line will be drawn between investing in a super-duper reader and just reading on a laptop.

Meanwhile, I need to give back this Sony Reader. I found the iPhone made me miss paper; the real test will be whether paper makes me miss the Reader.

Elaine Dundy: The Dud Avocado

2008-07-29T18:00:00.018-04:00

• On Amazon
• NYRB edition
• Author's website
• Excerpt

The Dud Avocado (1958) is the diary of an American girl's adventures in 1950s Paris. Sally Jay Gorce is coming of age and determined to run wild. She tries on a variety of personae and relationships--bureaucrat’s mistress, hard-partying absinthe drinker, actress, reluctant librarian. The situations are humorous, but what makes the book is her surprisingly modern voice and flippant, expressive language.

In this scene Sally Jay’s got herself stuck in the countryside with an ill-assorted group:

July 1-2. Somewhere between Monday and Tuesday. Late late late.

Our lives seem to be developing along the lines of Greek Tragedy--star-crossed and pursued by Furies. I'm not exaggerating. We ran into some old sparring partners tonight and it turned out to be a head-on collision. And here I am early in the morning again so charged up by all the clash-crashing I can't possibly get to sleep.

As a rule I'm rather fond of excitement. Raw, rollicking, riveting and toute cette sorte de crap, it has a way of forcing me out of myself and at the same time dragging me back in that I find truly exhilarating. On the whole I should say it's a fine thing; a stepping-up thing, a leading-to-action-t-least sort of thing. But is it an end in itself, I begin to wonder. I mean couldn't one have enough of it--or, to put it more plaintively--can't it have enough of me? I wish it would stop hovering over me like some privately commissioned thunderbolt.

It's a book full of great sentences. The idiosyncratic language gives Sally Jay's self-assessments extra personality and frankness. She wants a style, a role, a shtick--some means to stand out from the crowd--but she's honest with herself when it doesn't work.

Stranger than fiction

In a new introduction, Terry Teachout describes The Dud Avocado’s reception in 1958:

"It made me laugh, scream and guffaw (which, incidentally, is a great name for a law firm)," Groucho Marx declared in a fan letter to the author. "If this was actually your life, I don’t know how the hell you got through it." It was, more or less, and Groucho didn’t know the half of it.

I don't find Avocado screamingly funny--I only smiled--but reading about Dundy's own life adds a whole layer of interest. I love the close-knit literary world of that era; I enjoyed fitting Dundy's Paris in with the different Parises of Somerset Maugham, Anaïs Nin, and Lawrence Durrell.

The '50s were an especially bumpy time for Dundy; she wrote Avocado during a notoriously bad marriage to theater critic Kenneth Tynan. (There's hardly a dull detail in their history; for example, Tynan is perhaps most widely known as the first person to say "fuck" on British television.) Dundy describes Sally Jay as a comic alter ego, making all the choices she didn’t (and some that she did). Nonetheless, she gives Sally Jay a happy ending (presumably through a choice not made by her creator). It's a good ending too, showing Sally Jay another way to be individualistic.

Chick lit?

Teachout foresees "some dewey-eyed young critic" describing Sally Jay as "the spiritual grandmother of Bridget Jones". He's right: readers call it a smarter, funnier Sex and the City or Bridget Jones's Diary. However, I find Avocado more akin to a "lad lit" novel of the late '90s or '00s: young man explores the world, gets sexually liberated, tries on attitudes, and incidentally grows up a bit. Except this time it's a young woman, and her sexual adventuring takes place somewhat shockingly in the '50s.

Dundy herself didn't scorn chick lit; she enjoyed Bridget Jones's Diary. However, what she aspired to write were anti-heroines to match the "exhilarating" anti-heroes of the '60s, and she found many of today's heroines insipid:

[Kate Bolick, Boston Globe]: Well, what do you think about the evolution of available heroines over the course of your lifetime?

Dundy: In 1964, I said to my friend Emma Tennant, a novelist, "Have you noticed that we're having a really bad time? Doris Lessing and everyone always write heroines that are passive and put-upon." Emma said, "Absolutely. Why don't we do a whole magazine about it?" We published it in what you would call menstrual red, and I got all kinds of people, like Kingsley Amis and R.D. Laing, to write. So I think I was ahead of everyone in saying that women are getting a very bad deal. In "The Dud Avocado" I have Sally Jay saying, "It isn't our century."

Dundy died a few weeks ago; the obituaries are worth a read. I particularly like her friends' quotes in the LA Times.

Grade: B+ for a saggy middle; A- for lively language.

The Tupperware economy

2008-07-25T09:00:00.013-04:00

Just following up on my last post on the Tupperware! film. The documentary skims over the business aspect, but some of it's quite timely.

In hard times, women sell Tupperware

This week the NY Times reported new economic data showing a reversal in women's gains in employment and pay. As the US economy slackens, both men and women are leaving the workforce, and many women aren't returning to work. The important corollary finding is that this attrition is not due to women choosing to stay home. Yet again, "it's the economy, stupid".

As women's employment drops, Tupperware sales rise. In March, CBS Evening News discussed Tupperware sales as supplemental income. Tupperware CEO Rick Goings explained that

Direct selling in general is counter cyclical. That means when economies are soft, you usually have higher unemployment, and when there's higher unemployment there's a larger recruiting pool. And the number one driver of direct-selling companies is recruiting the sales force.

CBS Eye to Eye: Tupperware CEO Rick Goings

Passing the bowl from women to recent immigrants

Direct-sales schemes targeted toward women typically have low startup costs. This low barrier to entry makes the business accessible to people without a lot of investment capital and, as Goings pointed out, there's no minimum educational level and no experience required.

That combination worked for Brownie Wise and other working-class women. I suppose it's a logical progression that Tupperware was highlighted in a CBS online show about a family of recent immigrants, The Papdits:

The writer of the Borat movie and Da Ali G Show brings outrageous comedy to CBS.com with The Papdits

A Kashmiri family is criss-crossing the US searching for the American dream with a camera crew on their tails. Gopi, the outspoken husband and father, believes America is the land of opportunity and sees himself as Donald Trump in an RV. Their future, he believes, is in crystal. He's just not quite sure what that is, or if it's legal. The family's first stop is Mount Ida, Arkansas, where wife Ritshi tries to become one of the local girls by hosting a neighbourhood Tupperware party, and son Bhaskar has some trouble handling a job as a caddy at the local country club. Can the Papdits make a life in America?

In the Tupperware! documentary, the Tupperware parties have an atmosphere of self-conscious gentility: the hostess works hard to present her wares as both functional and attractive, and strangely specialized party items such as deviled-egg serving trays are hot sellers. It's mete food for parody, and The Papdits upends those conventions to poke fun at both the Tupperware phenomenon and the new immigrants' cultural tone-deafness.

The Papdits: Ritsi's first Tupperware party

And the rest of the world

It's one thing when a new product becomes popular overseas. But isn't it a little odd to export the entire peculiar cultural phenomenon that is Tupperware? Not that Tupperware, or the selling of it, is a bad thing; I just have a very 1950s Americana image of the whole enterprise.

However, I'm clearly out of date. More than 80 percent of Tupperware's sales are now overseas. Most nations buy similar products, with a few tweaks to the Tupperware catalog. And most Tupperware dealers have similar motivations. In fact, create a Tupperware army anywhere in the world and you may get similar upheavals:

In Soweto, South Africa, Tupperware has a director who makes a six-figure income and drives a Mercedes. ...

But she makes it look like the car was bought by her husband because of traditional stigma against women being the high earners in a family.

The more things change...

... The more they change

The Tupperware biz is changing. According to PRI Marketplace, men now make up close to one percent of the Tupperware sales force; in 2006 three of the top 10 US sellers were men. Even the rapper Ice T threw a Tupperware party for charity.

These new Tupperware gents are changing the rules: selling online (no dressy little parties!), creating their own sales organizations, stealing each other's customers, fraudulently driving up each other's internet advertising costs.... The old-guard Tupperware ladies must be in shock. And someday soon perhaps the Soweto director's husband really will sell enough Tupperware Cupcake Couriers to buy a Mercedes.

American Experience: Tupperware!

2008-07-24T23:58:00.057-04:00

• On Amazon
• PBS site
• Director's site

PBS' American Experience: Tupperware! is a fascinating slice of American life in the 1950s. The story of plastic kitchenware is surprisingly off-the-wall; the interviews and stock footage are both strange and funny. I'd like more detail on the social and economic changes taking place in the postwar period, but the film is interesting and entertaining as it is.

The NY Times hits the major points of the film:

A reclusive inventor's plastic bowls rise to cultural icon status thanks to the marketing skills of a savvy single mother. The duo's unlikely partnership not only changes the way Americans store food, but creates the phenomenon of thousands of women making money by selling products from their living rooms.

The PBS promotional video and these three 1960s Tupperware ads show some great stock footage:

Fantasy & upward mobility

Earl Silas Tupper's patented designs drew critical acclaim but few sales. Brownie Wise had only an 8th-grade education and few assets, but her imagination and drive transformed Tupperware into an empire. The story sounds like corporate legend--but it's true. Wise was the prototype for a new upward mobility among "working-class women".

Wise’s concept was simple: Tupperware "parties" to pressure friends into purchasing. Creating a nice occasion was crucial to the message—both to partygoers and to saleswomen.

Wise herself had a strange history of embroidering her background. Her fantasies of wealth and comfort were specific, and she encouraged similar aspirations among her sales force:

Women who had worked in factories or five-and-tens or on farms were now dressed in white gloves and hats, self-assured, able to speak publicly with confidence. "It was a very privileged job ... Tupperware moved us up to being a lady," says dealer Clairie Brooks. Perhaps most important, Wise encouraged these women to believe in themselves and dream big. "Brownie had the ability to talk to your dreams. You could suddenly see yourself being something you hadn't thought about before," recalls salesperson Sylvia Boyd.

These fantasies played out at grand scale at the company’s annual Jubilee in Florida. The sales force was fêted and entertained at a giant playground for adults. In this video 600 Tupperware ladies dig for prizes including handbags, mink stoles, and double-boilers:

(More film clips)

Ah, '50s optimism

Tupperware! is based in part on Alison Clarke’s Tupperware: The Promise of Plastic in 1950s America. One chapter is titled "The Feminization of Positive Thinking"; the PBS Tupperware! site also discusses the Tupperware phenomenon as part of a culture of positivity:

Dale Carnegie's incredibly popular book, How to Win Friends & Influence People (1936), suggested that striving was its own reward, and offered formulas for making people likeable and charmingly persuasive. It dominated the success literature for years --and it is still in print. By the 1950s, Norman Vincent Peale was the big name in the field. His book, The Power of Positive Thinking, outsold every non-fiction book in the mid-1950s except the Bible.

I have to wonder how much of that optimism was black humor, or clutching at straws! As Virginia said on Teach Me Tonight,

"Leave It to Beaver" never showed the kids going through nuclear attack drills in their elementary schools. Real American kids did -- regularly.

Grade: B+. A documentary that amuses as much as it teaches. I just wish it had looked more directly at the macroscopic social changes of the time. Women were leaving the workplace after World War II; the industrial suburbs were taking on a new, upwardly-mobile character. Historian-director Laurie Kahn-Leavitt presents an enjoyably idiosyncratic view of Tupperware as a linchpin of cultural change, but I want more.

By the way, both the PBS website and the director's website are excellent.

Steampunk fashion

2008-07-11T19:44:00.013-04:00

I've posted before on steampunk fiction and real-life steampunk gadgets. I'm fascinated by steampunk's transition from literary niche to real-world lifestyle. Science fiction famously inspires new technologies; steampunk inspires the redesign of existing technologies in a different style and, often, a different technological heritage. It's a do-over, like returning to the creation of the Ford Model T to try steam power or electricity instead of gasoline.

However, the technologies aren’t everything. Now steampunk is moving from garage hobby into fashion, in increasingly mainstream venues. The NY Times highlighted steampunk in May, with a fashion slideshow and links to a number of designers and shops.

The article describes steampunk's mixture of Victorian and modern as

inspired by the extravagantly inventive age of dirigibles and steam locomotives, brass diving bells and jar-shaped protosubmarines.

Steampunk fashion can be similarly extravagant, even Gothic at times. But where Goth can have ragged edges, steampunk tends toward Edwardian structure. However, steampunk's a difficult style to pin down; there's enormous variety. Until recently steampunk fashion has been largely DIY, but now high-end designers are picking up on the look--including Nicolas Ghesquière (Balenciaga), Alexander McQueen, and Ralph Lauren.

(Note the brass Rubiks cube at left!)
Steampunk's emergence in fashion feels like a retro fad, but that isn't quite right. Steampunk is retrofuturistic, based on a fantasy of the past and the future. Perhaps that places it closer to Goth culture, or to the Society for Creative Anachronism or other attempts to create a more romantic or adventurous lifestyle in the modern era. After all, to Jake von Slatt

[Steampunk is] essentially the intersection of technology and romance.

Fashionwise, I foresee some steampunk googling in my near future. I really like the way the look evokes a mishmash of eras.

I also like the idea that the mainstreaming of steampunk indicates some heightened interest in alternate paths to and views of the future. That would be worth arguing over a drink. The NY Times article even starts down that path, describing steampunk as accommodating

a stew of influences, including the streamlined retro-futurism of Flash Gordon and Japanese animation with its goggle-wearing hackers, the postapocalyptic scavenger style of “Mad Max,” and vaudeville, burlesque and the structured gentility of the Victorian age.

Sure enough, Balenciaga and McQueen both went retrofuturistic with last year's designs. Somehow I don't see myself 'punking it up in any of those, but the NYT points to some gorgeous stuff....

At any rate I'm inspired to pick out a retrofuturistic film for tonight. We have a small pile including Brazil (Terry Gilliam, 1985), Buck Rogers (the 1930s cinema serial, which looks wonderfully ridiculous), and Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927). All I lack is a retrofuturistic popcorn popper. Maybe this weekend I'll read some Jules Verne.

Daniel Jones: Modern Love--50 True & Extraordinary Tales of Desire, Deceit, & Devotion

2008-07-07T23:43:00.031-04:00

• On Amazon
• At NYT store
• NYT samples

Modern Love is a collection of 50 short essays from The New York Times' freelance Modern Love column. "Love" here includes a lot of poignancy and lonely introspection, but little sex or sweetness. However, a few of the best essays are excellent.

Editor Daniel Jones’ selections are interesting and surprisingly even in quality. Perhaps too even; the themes and voices can be too uniform, and the collection is grouped by similarity rather than variety. I thought there were 20 essays too many, but I enjoyed them more once I started to skip and skim.

Why “modern” love?

The collection hits some obviously modern notes: flirting by text message, a painful conversion from housewife to feminist, being lovers and colleagues, sperm donors, gay adoption. The essays also touch on a mobile society: the long-distance romances and pseudo-familial relationships developed by people living far from home. Implicit too is a set of male/female relationships that I’m not sure older generations have experienced: unisex dorm life, cross-sex friendships, and mixed housing situations lasting long after college.

My favorite essays are those that directly address modern culture, particularly Waldman, Korelitz, and Hekker. For those writers who hew to the more personal, Jones appends “where are they now” updates that I find slightly jarring. Each piece is short, and many are online, so I’ll just point to a few of the interesting ones.

Seeking: R We D8ing?

In this section romance is largely about the writer, not the other person. In Sandra Barron’s R We D8ing?, an exchange of cryptic one-liners (from R we still on 4 2morrow? to What did I do 2 upset u?) is a mini-relationship with a full complement of emotional highs and lows. It’s fascinating that we can invest meaning in even such a sparse exchange.

Mindy Hung’s I Seemed Plucky and Game, Even To Myself describes playing a role to be desirable. Trey Ellis' Who's That Lady in the Bedroom, Daddy? feels unfinished, but it’s unusually sweet for this collection.

Finding: I Think I Love You

Howie Kahn's The Third Half of a Couple evokes years of group living. Good roommates can become as close as family or lovers. Kahn takes that intimacy a step farther, using his friends as a shield against dating.

I depend on the stability of their marriage; I need them to stay together so I can go where they go and do what they do. Simply put, I'm their third wheel.

Breeding: What to Expect That You're Least Expecting

Ann Hood's Now I Need a Place to Hide Away touches on music and memory and the joy of a shared obsession. The TMI problem of Helaine Olen's The New Nanny Diaries Are Online may ring a bell if you’ve ever google-stalked a friend. Dan Savage writes honestly about the pitfalls of open adoption.

Staying: The Ties That Bind

Ayelet Waldman contributes a controversial essay, Truly, Madly, Guiltily, that I've read before but always enjoy.

I am the only woman in Mommy and Me who seems to be, well, getting any. ... I love my children. But I am not in love with them. I am in love with their father.

Jean Hanff Korelitz's Sleeping with the Guitar Player has a surprise ending from a cynical start:

in the last few years I've experienced, via my husband, another masculine stage, one I'd been blissfully unaware of. This is the time of a man's life that I must now and forever think of as the guitar-in-the-basement phase.

I’m sure some readers hate her framing of the guitar-in-the-basement in terms of gender and ambition; it’s as provocative as Waldman’s essay.

Leaving: The Ties That Fray

I like the honesty of Terry Martin Hekker's 2006 essay on motherhood and feminism, Paradise Lost (Domestic Division):

In the continuing case of Full-Time Homemaker v. Working Mother, I offer myself as Exhibit A. Because more than a quarter-century ago I wrote an Op-Ed article for the New York Times on the satisfaction of being a full-time housewife in the new age of the liberated woman. I wrote it from my heart, thoroughly convinced that homemaking and raising my children was the most challenging and rewarding job I could ever want.

Read her 1977 Op-Ed as well. The essays are both passionate and forthright, though they present different viewpoints thirty years apart.

Bound: Family Ties

I find Leaving and Bound difficult sections to read. They’re too much alike, a litany of strangely similar divorces and deaths. Skipping around in the book helps, but neither the situations nor the telling can hold my interest through these final sections.

Overall this collection might be a C+, but a few pieces in it were excellent. I’ve read my fill for now, but I discovered some interesting personalities through the columns.

Book sales and Amazon reviews

2008-04-14T20:37:00.008-04:00

According to recent surveys, online shoppers love to read reviews.

In 2007 a PowerReviews/e-tailing group survey ¹ found that 68% of online shoppers read at least four product reviews before purchasing. Only 2% of online shoppers claimed not to read reviews.

Two other 2007 surveys emphasize the importance of user reviews. Forrester Research ² found that online shoppers want to see user ratings and reviews more than they want special offers or coupons, videos, personalization, or games. Avenue A|Razorfish ³ found that more online shoppers used user reviews than used comparison charts or expert reviews.

Do reviews affect book sales?

In terms of total book sales, reviews may increase sales to infrequent readers, but probably not to bookworms like me. My book purchases are a relatively fixed volume: I buy as many as I can read.

Do reviews shift which sites I buy from? Not much. I read newspaper and blog reviews, so I'm as likely to research books in an RSS newsreader as on a bookseller's site. I imagine many shoppers like to research and purchase all at one site, but the Avenue A|Razorfish study showed a growing population using RSS feeds, so I'm probably not alone.

So how much do user reviews shift purchases from book to book?

In 2003-04 Chevalier and Mayzlin ⁴ studied Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com, focusing on whether specific books' sales were affected by:

The availability or lack of reviews
Whether the reviews were positive or negative.

Chevalier and Mayzlin compared book-by-book sales data from Amazon and B&N to test several arguments against hosting user reviews. The analysis is a little out of date as Amazon’s review system keeps changing; I’ll interpose some links and thoughts along with their findings.

1. Motivation: Why review for free?

Or, as Steven Levitt of Freakonomics puts it: What motivates the 1,000th reviewer to contribute? Hasn’t everything already been said?

That depends on what the reviewer stands to benefit. Many Amazon reviews are probably written simply as an outlet to gush or rant over a book. I enjoy thinking critically about books, and discussing books with others. In 2003, reviewer Francis McInerney’s goal was to be mentioned in acknowledgments or quoted on a book jacket.

In terms of sales, even that 1,000th review may have some effect. Chevalier and Mayzlin found that over time,

an increase in the number of reviews at Amazon.com relative to bn.com continues to improve sales at Amazon.com relative to bn.com.

In other words, Amazon's approach pays off. Once an active reviewing community is established, those reviewers' interests can drive sales to the public at large. (It's interesting that this effect was documented on Amazon, where the review community can be highly competitive. It may be that a contentious atmosphere within the review community is not visible or important to non-reviewing book-buyers.)

2. Free-riding: Research here, buy there

I admit, I research books on Amazon far more often than I buy from Amazon. I would guess that free-riding happens mostly in that direction: most users know to go to Amazon for reviews, but fewer would leave Amazon for B&N reviews. After all, Chevalier and Mayzlin show that most books have fewer reviews on BN.com than on Amazon and "BN.com’s total sales equal about 15% of Amazon.com’s North American sales" ⁴.

On the other hand, I'm not sure free-riding should be a disincentive to host reviews. Sure, I sometimes read Amazon reviews but purchase elsewhere. But that means Amazon's reviews have lured me away from another site for at least part of the buying process.

Because of free-riding, Chevalier and Mayzlin's analysis

potentially greatly under-estimates the effect of word of mouth on sales…. Barnes & Noble.com customers could read Amazon reviews, or, similarly, Amazon reviews could affect offline sales. In fact, the success of a recently released best-seller “DaVinci Code” was attributed partly to an endorsement by... Francis McInerney.

That's right: a lone reviewer like Harriet Klausner can be influential in book sales.

3. Five-star (in)credibility

Chevalier and Mayzlin speculated that authors probably review their own books, so positive reviews wouldn't be as credible. This issue hit the news in 2004 (during Chevalier and Mayzlin’s study), when Amazon.ca briefly outed a number of authors who had given rave reviews to their own works and one-star reviews to rivals.

Since then Amazon has instituted Real Names, refined reviewers' “reputations”, and built up the Amazon "community" in hopes that it would self-police. These remedies have cut down on proliferating identities and self-reviewing, but of course abuses are impossible to prevent. In 2006 an Amazon UK Marketplace shop bribed a customer to change his review. The current flap involves an author berating and google-stalking reviewers.

Not all review trickery is driven by sales. Some Amazon users are motivated by Top 100 Reviewer status. Positive reviews are more often tagged as “Helpful”, which in turn increases the reviewer’s status in the Amazon community.

Can reviewers conspire to drive sales? As far as I know, I rarely run across coordinated campaigns of positive reviews on Amazon--though when I do, they're usually pretty obvious. However, author (or fan) trickery isn't the only reason to be leery of positive reviews. Many five-star reviews simply gush; there's often more information in mixed reviews. Chevalier and Mayzlin's analysis confirms that perception to some extent; they found that three-star reviews were, on average, longer than one- and five-star reviews.

At the same time I wonder if consumers tend to discount both positive and negative reviews. There's a large number of crank and bogus reviews on Amazon along with the five-star reviews.

4. Negative reviews may depress sales

It surprises me that consumers expect Amazon to act as an unbiased review site. On a website without user reviews, cherry-picking reviews would be business as usual. I don't really suspect Amazon of gross chicanery; it's not in the company's interests to deceive customers. Nonetheless, it wouldn't surprise me if Amazon removed negative reviews more readily than positive reviews.

Chevalier and Mayzlin provide some additional motivation for that idea. They found that one-star reviews (which are relatively rare) have more effect on sales than do five-star reviews. They piggyback this onto the credibility problem:

Although the author can post a large number of meaningless five-star reviews cheaply, he or she cannot prevent others from posting one-star reviews.

Mayzlin reiterated this finding in a February '08 NPR story, but didn’t mention an important wrinkle: their data were collected back before the Real Name program cut down on users with many accounts, and when Amazon displayed the most recent review first. It’s hard to say what these findings mean now that Amazon allows the user to sort reviews by star ratings.

Furthermore, Chevalier and Mayzlin's main analysis was of uncensored reviews. When they analyzed a smaller set of books for which Amazon had “pruned” the reviews, they found that new one-star reviews had no more effect than new five-star reviews. Was that "pruning" the same process that Amazon follows today?

On a positive note, Chevalier and Mayzlin also found that:

Reviews are generally positive (more so at BN.com than Amazon.com)
Consumers don’t just rely on a product’s average number of stars, but actually read the text of each other’s reviews

References

¹ PowerReviews/the e-tailing group. Social Shopping Study 2007. Nov. 2007.
1,200 people spending at least $500 per year in at least four online transactions.

² Forrester Research, North American Technographics Customer Experience, Marketing and Consumer Technology Online Survey. Q3, 2007.
A non-random survey of 5,366 US and Canadian consumers. Includes purchases of consumer electronics, travel and banking sites. Partial summary in Online Media Daily, Feb. 2008.

³ Avenue A | Razorfish. Digital Consumer Behavior Study. July 2007.
Only 475 respondents from a pretty high-tech group: 60% of respondents write or comment on blogs regularly.

⁴ Judith A. Chevalier and Dina Mayzlin. The Effect of Word of Mouth on Sales: Online Book Reviews. Yale School of Management Working Paper No's. ES-28 & MK-15 . First published online via SSRN, 2003. Final publication in Journal of Marketing Research 43(8): 345-354.

E-books dry run

2008-02-13T23:50:00.022-05:00

Lately all my reading time is during my commute. That's already too little time, so it's frustrating when I have to leave my book behind so I can carry a sack of groceries.

As a result I'm eyeing e-books, e-reader gadgets, and e-reader software on phones. Can technology help me read more? I'm not sure, but it's worth a try.

Unfortunately the options are overwhelming. I've bought a few e-books in Adobe PDF format, but reading them on the computer hurts my eyes. I like the Sony Reader's non-backlit screen and "page turn" buttons, but I want wireless. I like the Amazon Kindle's wireless but not the fees. Sometimes I don't have a Sony Reader-sized bag with me, just a phone. I don't enjoy reading for long periods on my phone, as the screen is small. I love to read paper, damn it, but paper is heavy. And bulky.

Yes, I have all the symptoms of analysis paralysis.

However, I've found a low-stress way to experiment. My library now offers e-books.

My library, font of technology

The best part of starting with the library's system is that they've already made some choices for me. They provide each book in Adobe and Mobipocket format. I know what Adobe looks like, so that leaves just one kind of reader software to try out. (Limited options can be a good thing!)

So far I've checked out three books. I can read them on both my computer and my phone. That's important to me. Reading on my phone alone is too irritating; I don't want to read on a phone at home. But do I really want to read on a computer screen at home? I already suspect that what I want is a paper copy at home and an electronic copy on my phone.

Apparently each book is mine for a few weeks and then "returns itself automatically"--a great feature that stirs my curiosity. I suppose I could stay up till midnight on the due date, watching my e-books return themselves. Will they vanish in a puff of smoke? Or maybe fade off my screen? I suspect they'll simply stop working, but I like the idea.

Tomorrow I'll try out this new system.

Full of spirits

2008-01-29T23:03:00.002-05:00

I have a small stack of books I don't plan to finish. Most of them are simply boring, but one is a fairly entertaining story. Before it leaves my possession, I'd like to immortalize (in blog fashion, at least) one unintentionally entertaining line:

Chapter Two

Vinny awoke next morning full of spirits.

I'm certain that's meant as "in high spirits", but that's not how I took it on a first read.

I'll leave you to imagine how she got so full of spirits.

The science of romance

2008-01-28T07:30:00.000-05:00

This week is Time Magazine's annual Mind/Body special issue. The theme this year is "The Science of Romance".

Several of the articles articulate physiological and psychological patterns that I would love to see more imaginatively treated in fiction--and not only in romance. The body language of flirtation, and why we flirt while in a relationship. Why we develop cultural ideas--beyond the "good girl" notion--about sex on the first date. How online dating really works. Why the darker side of passion can be attractive.

Time's descriptions of the articles:

Why We Love
Breeding is easy, but survival requires romance too. How our brains, bodies and senses help us find it

Why We Flirt
That smile! That glance! That rapt attention! We flirt even when we don't need to. And that can be good.

Marry Me
Say yes, and you're in for more than love, children and a home. Better health and a longer life are part of the deal
By Lori Oliwenstein

Are Gay Relationships Different?
Why gay couples have more equality and less tension at home--but still split up more often than straight pairs

Crazy Love
Our partners may be obsessive, possessive, even dangerous. There's a reason we stick around--often at our own peril
By Steven Pinker

Love Letters [not available online]
A peek at what real people write when they're falling in love

We Just Clicked
Online matchmaking sites in the U.S. are eyeing millions of singles in China, India and beyond. Will love translate?

Young Love
Romance is a grand pageant. Your debut may not come until you're in your teens, but you spend a childhood rehearsing

Romance Is An Illusion
Could something that feels so real be a mere trick of the mind? Sure, when the survival of the species is at stake
By Carl Zimmer

Love Lines
One-liners on love:
'Take me or leave me; or, as is the usual order of things, both.'
DOROTHY PARKER, poet and writer

To Our Readers
Romance makes us giddy--or flat-out crazy. Our science team breaks down the chemical, sociological and evolutionary reasons

Famous Pairings

Famous Couples
A gallery of some of the twentieth century's great romances

Star Pairs

Love among animals

Wildly In Love
Humans aren't alone. Romance appears to roam among animals too

Wildly In Love
A collection of amorous animals with illustrations for TIME by Dugald Stermer

The book title's secret meaning

2008-01-17T22:58:00.005-05:00

Lately I'm struck by common themes in book titles. All publishers want titles that stand out, but some of the recent trends are pretty strange, and they cut across romance, literary fiction, and nonfiction.

The romance novel's tabloid titillation

For the last few years the Harlequin/Mills & Boon romance racks have been filled with ever-hokier titles. I find the new titles silly and even insulting--but they sell. In 2007, Jennifer Crusie found these titles on seven out of ten of Waldenbooks' top selling romances:

The Future King's Pregnant Mistress (Penny Jordan, Harlequin Presents)
The CEO's Scandalous Affair (Roxanne St. Claire, Silhouette Desire)
The Boss's Demand (Jennifer Lewis, Silhouette Desire)
The Prince's Ultimate Deception (Emilie Rose, Silhouette Desire)
The Millionaire Boss's Baby (Maggie Cox, Harlequin Presents)
Taken: The Spaniard's Virgin (Lucy Monroe, Harlequin Presents)
The Sicilian's Red-Hot Revenge (Kate Walker, Harlequin Presents)

(These titles are a relatively recent trend. In Harlequin Presents titles from the 1980s and early '90s few heroines, and few actions, were "owned" by the hero, and titular "virgins" were fairly rare; Brittany's Castle was as likely a title as Taggart's Woman.)

Regardless of how the new titles sell to romance aficionados, they project a certain image. Even many romance readers are put off by the strange focus on virginity, the outdated idea of the "mistress", the national stereotypes, the consumerist and social-climbing dimension, and the overuse of possessives. Isn't it enough that he's a Greek tycoon/Spaniard/CEO who owns half a continent? Must he own the heroine and her virginity too?

But perhaps that's being too literal. Crusie makes an interesting point about why these titles appeal:

These are National Enquirer titles with promises of tabloid excitement–a pregnant king’s mistress, we’ve got the pictures!!!–mini-synopses with the good parts highlighted

It's true, the titles rarely reflect the style of the story, only a bare-bones setup. So perhaps the title is meant to convey excitement rather than content. The basic tabloid formula is a celebrity, a possessive, and a sex-word or shock-word: "Christina Aguilera's baby shocker!" Sure enough, we have a match. (If you think The Boss's Demand doesn’t have a sex-word... in the context of those titles, it’s pretty clear what the boss’s demand is—and it ain’t coffee.)

The celebrity tabloid interpretation also fits Harlequin Presents' recent Tips on Writing, which enjoin the author to

Remember the values that underpin the Presents series – such as, wealth, luxury, sophistication, escapism and a good dollop of passion

Historic shockers

In a 2006 NY Times article, two Harlequin executive editors pointed out that stand-out titles are harder to come by in voluminous genres :

Romance, mystery and other genre books are particularly likely to have recycled titles, because of the vast numbers that are published and their brief lives in the public's memory — meaning a name can be brought back within a few years.

But there are other ways to create dramatic tabloid titles. Sheer strangeness is pretty effective. In the 1940s Harlequin started their numbered paperback series with some distinctive titles, including:

The Manatee: Strange Loves of a Seaman (Harlequin #1, Nancy Bruff, 1949)
Maelstrom: A Brutal Saga of Love and Violence (Harlequin #3, Howard Hunt, 1949)
The Golden Feather: Flight From Bondage (Harlequin #31, Theda Kenyon, 1951)

These titles are certainly attention-getting. In fact, the older Harlequin titles would fit perfectly in today's popular nonfiction, where the more obscure or in-your-face the title, the better. Nonfiction is full of disgusting, unlikely, goofy, or mock-helpful titles:

A Pictorial Book of Tongue Coating
The Professor and the Madman
People Who Don't Know They're Dead: How They Attach Themselves to Unsuspecting Bystanders - and What to Do About It
So Your Wife Came Home Speaking in Tongues? So Did Mine!

Sidekick makes good?

Tabloid frenzy among romance readers can't be the whole explanation, because this trend in titles crosses genres. In The Guardian, Judith Evans lists a number of titles that use possessives but not shock-words--or perhaps a different kind of shock-words:

The Time Traveller's Wife (Audrey Niffenegger)
The Editor's Wife (Clare Chambers)
The Abortionist's Daughter (Elizabeth Hyde)
The Pilot's Wife (Anita Shreve)
The Firework Maker's Daughter (Philip Pullman)
The Kitchen God's Wife (Amy Tan)
The Memory Keeper's Daughter (Kim Edwards)
The Gravedigger's Daughter (Joyce Carol Oates)
The Alchemist's Daughter (Katherine McMahon)
The Ringmaster's Daughter (Jostein Gaarder)
The Zookeeper's Wife (Diane Ackerman)
The Emancipator's Wife (Barbara Hambly)
The Senator's Wife (Sue Miller)

Evans theorizes that these titles

[play] to another motif that pervades our culture - that of taking the neglected sidekick and making them the main attraction..... A handy formula for a magazine feature is "X gets all the attention - but why don't we focus on the far more interesting and neglected Y?" ...

So far, so encouraging; weak women emerge from the sidelines; victims get the limelight. But I'm sceptical. For a start, there's no reason - in this day and age! - that the woman shouldn't be the time traveller, Greek tycoon or gravedigger herself; the retro aesthetic that takes us back to a more or less imaginary age of alchemists and ringmasters also takes us back to a time when women were stuck being sidekicks and stalwarts.

I'm not so sure these titles are out of joint with the times. Some of these titles evoke a family that's out of step with societal expectations--a timeless topic that's especially apt in times of social change.

I also quibble with Evans' sense of currency. These days a woman can be the time traveler, but those changes have happened quite recently, generationally speaking. Many women still alive today grew up in a time when they didn't expect to be the alchemist or the breadwinner for the family. Women who stand in the limelight are still outnumbered in part (though not entirely) because lifespans are long.

However, the second paragraph in that quote sparks my curiosity. As Evans asks, "Why are we so obsessed with fantastic returns to such social arrangements? And are literary novelists who do so really any different from romance writers who dream of being overwhelmed by an untamed desert sheikh?"

Fantasy and romance, gaming and girls

2007-12-11T23:51:00.000-05:00

Since reading C.L. Wilson's Lord of the Fading Lands, I've been thinking about fantasy romance. In my teens I read fantasy with central romances, and lately I've read romances set in fantasy worlds. This year Fading Lands rocketed up the USA Today list; obviously it's a successful combination of genres.

I asked a male friend, an avid fantasy reader, whether he sees more romance--or more interesting female roles--in fantasy these days. His response took me down a path I'd never thought about:

If you want to know how fantasy is changing look at roleplaying games (RPG). Back when I started Dungeons & Dragons it was the stereotypical teenage dorks in a basement. We didn't know jack about relationships....

You could barter but you never really developed relationships. There literally weren't rules for how characters could have sex. You could roll a 6 and do some magic or a 2 and get killed but you couldn't have sex....

These days it's more realistic. A lot of those guys if they're still into it write their own games.... You can get rules for sex now but mostly teenage boys are into that.... I don't play the same way with my wife sitting there. Even if she wasn't there I know about real sex now so I wouldn't waste a good roll ripping off some character's clothes. I guess that makes me officially old.

(I'm not a gamer, so my edits may have introduced some nonsense. He's a detail guy, so I simplified greatly.)

D&D sex guides

A quick google confirms that there is now a rule book for including sexual elements in D&D:

The first chapter... provides an overview of various facets of sex such as humor, sexual orientation, fetishes, prostitution, pornography, commitment and infidelity, chastity, pregnancy....

New uses for existing skills include Appraising a potential partner, Bluffing to connect with someone, Knowledge about various topics, Perform (sexual techniques).... New feats include... Disarming Looks, Limber....

One female dungeon master has written a lengthy guidance on incorporating lust and full-fledged romance into Dungeons and Dragons:

The romance that has dominated so many of our fairy tales can come to life in a roleplaying game and it can expand roleplaying options exponentially. Characters in D&D can fall in love..., get married, have trysts and children. One of the ways that a DM defines their game is by deciding how much love and sex they'll allow....

There are very few references to sex in any of the new mainstream D&D books. There is an out of the way reference in the Forgotten Realms setting book (cassil root and narrowroot are herbs which can be used as birth control for limited periods of time.) There is some mention of prostitution in the Book of Vile Darkness. Every now and then mating habits and gestation are discussed in regard to the many different races and creatures....

She goes on to discuss the implications of race and class for divorce (the long-lived elves might not expect faithfulness over hundreds of years), the use of magic spells to enhance sex, and other topics.

Video: D&D fantasy romance

My googling also turned up several funny videos by Youtuber FearofGirls, depicting two RPG players' attempts to introduce romance into their game.

In Episode 1, we meet Elite Game Master Doug and his best friend Raymond (a.k.a. the barbarian Krunk). These two have long since abandoned the commercially available games to create their own. Doug says his games have "themes and subject matter [sex and gore] which, quite frankly, would simply be too strong for your hobbyist gamer". (Note that "hobbyist" is an epithet.)

Here's a short outtake of Doug and Raymond's attempts to add fantasy girls and fantasy sex to the game:

At the end of Episode 1, Doug and Raymond are intrigued with the idea of playing against real girls. In Episode 2 the girls arrive and the mayhem takes a new turn:

I like the blend of sincerity and mockery, and the way the budding-romance subplot shapes the game as the game shapes the romance. The romance, of course, turns out to be pure fantasy, but the final plot twists make some clever points. Dangerously Adorable Productions seem to know their subject awfully well ;)

All of Episode 1, and many more outtakes, are on the FearofGirls Youtube page.

C.L. Wilson: Lord of the Fading Lands

2007-12-04T11:11:00.003-05:00

• On Amazon
• Author's website
• Excerpt (PDF)

Erin Galloway of Dorchester Publishing was nice enough to send me an advance copy of Lord of the Fading Lands. I’m glad she did--Wilson has a gift for storytelling, and her prose is polished. I was disappointed by the book’s reliance on well-used tropes: the romance is straight out of Christine Feehan’s Carpathian playbook and the fantasy setting is more detailed than innovative. Nonetheless, for a debut novel it’s striking, and I’ll try another book sometime.

Rainier Tairen Soul, King of the Fey, is several thousand years old and a part-time fire-breathing giant winged cat. The last time he ventured out of the Fading Lands, he destroyed half a continent. Now a vision sends him back into the world, seeking a future for his people.

Ellysetta Baristani is the adopted daughter of a woodcarver in stodgy, pious, unmagical Celieria. Ellie appears to be simply a preternaturally nice mortal girl, but Rain recognizes her instantly as his other half. Women don't get to choose their marriages in this world, so it's up to Rain to convince the Celierian king to release Ellie from another man’s claim. Claiming Ellie and politicking distract Rain from investigating a nebulous conspiracy, but it appears that that conflict will happen in a later book.

Alpha and orphan

Ellie and Rain are familiar romance character types—so familiar that based on an excerpt, Laura Vivanco pegged the characters:

the hero was a type I’d read many times before. He’s the most powerful male in the world, he’s capable of violent rages, he has a very tortured past and he falls in love with an innocent, much younger woman. He’s so possessive he frightens her, and he reacts instantly to any threat (perceived or real) against her….

The heroine’s an orphan who’s something of an ugly duckling (perceived as ugly by her adoptive culture, coming into her own power), under threat and in need of rescue…

Wilson sometimes sacrifices character development for reinforcement of these standard traits. Instead of how Rain reacts to the world, we’re told what he wears; instead of who he is now, we get his powers, his tragic history, and generalizations about the Fey.

The built-up world

Wilson’s attention to detail is laudable, but sometimes less might be more. For example, an important courtroom scene includes a lengthy description¹ of Rain’s clothes. It doesn’t say anything new—we know he's handsome, wealthy, and powerful—so rather than the fashion report, I’d like to see the legal and political interludes developed farther. These scenes are crucial to illuminate inter-kingdom politics, and to explain the villains. (The evil Mages merit more discussion--thus far, they're simplistic villains for villainy's sake.)

Sci fi and fantasy author M John Harrison propounds a different approach to worldbuilding:

Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over worldbuilding. […] Worldbuilding numbs the reader’s ability to fulfil their part of the bargain, because it believes that it has to do everything around here if anything is going to get done.

Above all, worldbuilding is not technically necessary. It is the great clomping foot of nerdism. It is the attempt to exhaustively survey a place that isn’t there.

and

Substitute imagination for exhaustiveness, and inventiveness for research.

Harrison is often provocative, and here he stakes out an extreme view, but I agree to a large extent. Not every world must be built the same way, but in Fading Lands I wanted a better balance of emotional and political explication versus décor. The detailed description also slows down some key scenes, which may be one reason some readers find Fading Lands slow going.

Truemates, lifemates, fated love

In the Elloran world, fate and race determine much of the characters’ lives. Every Fey character is noble and gifted; every Celierian character is ordinary. This robs the diplomatic conflict of tension: the Celierians are too far outclassed by the Fey. Ellie’s special qualities are evidently due to her non-Celierian blood; even her father’s business success has a non-Celierian cause. The Celierian women come off particularly poorly. Their lives are dictated by fate, race, and whichever man claims them, and they’re not notably charming, admirable, intelligent, or honorable: they’re perfect pawns for the men of the story.

The lack of outstanding female characters, and the emphasis on fate, are also clear in the romance. Wilson says her “truemates” concept is not the same as Feehan’s “lifemates”. I see no essential difference between the two, though some readers disagree with me. Like Feehan’s Carpathians, Fey men are fearsome warriors, but each kill adds darkness to their souls, gradually deadening their emotions. Like the Carpathians, Fey women are gentle; Ellie fits right in, as her sweetness heals all wounds and even inspires a Fey bodyguard to pledge himself to her. (It’s a little much; not even Feehan’s women save the souls of men other than their mates.) Like Feehan's Carpathians, there's some lip service given to the importance of the woman making an emotional choice but the outcome is never in serious doubt.

Fading Lands also reminds me of Ann Maxwell (Elizabeth Lowell)’s Timeshadow Rider (1986), a space-fantasy romance about a made-for-each-other couple from an all-powerful race with an animalistic side. However, Maxwell’s book is explicitly about overcoming cultural conditioning and sets up a more clearly worked-out tension between fate and choice.

Wilson is a good storyteller, and I enjoyed Fading Lands, though I found it heavy on genre clichés. Many romance readers will enjoy the alpha male/sweet female relationship, but on the fantasy side the mythology and characterization seem rather standard and un-innovative. It didn't strike the sweet spot for me, but it was an engaging read.

Grade: B-
(I'd give it a C+ for carrying forward so many bad-old-days-of-fantasy conventions, but it's really no worse than average in that regard. Besides, it's a B+ for storytelling. Storytelling and voice mean a lot to me.)

¹ From Chapter 6:

Tall, lean, and searingly handsome, Rainier vel’En Daris exuded the dark, dangerous beauty and mystery of the Fey race as he strode down the blue carpet. His black leather tunic and snug leggings seemed to absorb light, while his bristling collection of Fey blades were so highly polished that they reflected light back with almost blinding intensity. Black boots, tooled with scarlet and purple tairen, crossed the length of the throne room in smooth, ground-eating strides. A scarlet sash embroidered with taired worked in gold thread draped from his left shoulder to his right hip, just below one of the two crossed bands of Fey’cha daggers, while a chain made of fist-sized squares of gold, each set with large Tairen’s Eye crystals, hung from one shoulder to the other. A golden crown circled his head, each of its six points topped with a small globe of priceless Tairen’s Eye crystal. Even without the crown, no one who saw him could fail to recognize he was a King. He carried power as effortlessly as his broad shoulders carried the purple-lined black cape that billowed out behind him.

Kit Whitfield: Benighted (Bareback)

2007-11-30T03:10:00.001-05:00

• On Amazon
• Author's website
• Excerpt

Benighted (Bareback in the UK) is a striking and well-written novel set in a grim alternate reality. Whitfield depicts rampant social injustice and a culture of chronic violence. The emoting is on the heavy-handed side, but the main character and the world are engrossing.

Benighted is a modern-day story, but grounded in an alternate history dating back to the Middle Ages. Lycanthropy is the norm, and every full moon the population turns wolf. Society copes with its animal side repressively, imposing full-moon curfews and lock-ups.

Far worse off are the tiny minority who are born disabled, unable to change. These non-lunes or “barebacks” are despised and disadvantaged from birth; as adults, they’re pressed into dangerous work “dogcatching” for the government, sent out at full moon to round up and pen loose wolves.

The story is told by Lola May Galley, a dogcatcher and legal representative for lune offenders. When her colleagues are attacked by both wolves and humans, Lola fears she’s next.

Benighted society

Whitfield presents a very effective dystopia, with a lot to say about power and privilege, and clear analogies to modern social injustice. Non-lunes are only one percent of the population, but they’re crucial to maintain lune society’s compartmentalization of their wolf natures—a Faustian bargain dating back to the Inquisition years:

Luning, already regarded by the Church with the suspicion that sex, childbirth, and all the other carnal upheavals the human frame fell prey to, became a matter of panic. The Inquisition came down hard; they went on the hunt. The Dominicans, the founders of it all, took up their nickname like a banner: Domini Canes, the Hounds of God, appointed to run down Satan’s wolves. Protestants, who by then were killing Catholics with equal fervor, declared luning to be an unregenerate state, because you were incapable of faith while under its influence. Pious citizens who feared temptation to sin, or frightened citizens who didn’t want to find themselves at the stake, take your pick, but people began locking themselves away. […]

We were useful, back then. People needed us.

That’s Lola: intelligent, bitter, and well aware of the ugly sides of the law she serves.

Despite the themes of prejudice and alienation, this is not an epic struggle of good versus evil. It’s Lola’s book, and she lives in a moral grey area—as do her lune clients. Lunes rarely remember their wolf experiences, and civil trials permit what amounts to a sleepwalking defense: I did it while I was a wolf; I don't remember it; I wouldn't have done it otherwise. The lunes’ inability to police themselves makes it hard to imagine a "save the world" happy ending; the world of Benighted remains screwed up, and the focus stays on Lola’s struggle to stay alive and sane.

Not likable, but sympathetic and reliable

Lola is frankly a bit of a pill. She has to be tough to survive her job, but she’s also inconsistent, self-centered, and prejudiced. She’s a thorough pessimist, and a nervous wreck—certainly not the tiresome "plucky heroine triumphs over adversity" female character type, but is she too hard to like? Not in my judgment. Lola’s not precisely an unplucky sad sack, and she’s no villain, but she’s a character on the cusp. Will fear harden her attitude into outright persecution of lunes, or will she continue trying to walk the line, defending lunes in court and treating them as humans--except at full moon?

I find Lola more sympathetic than likable—or perhaps likable by Anne Lamott’s liberal definition: "someone whose take on things fascinates you", who’s flawed in understandable ways, or who has the survivor’s "certain clarity of vision". Lola’s rough edges are understandable, and I appreciate seeing a complex female character facing significant moral dilemmas.

The over-bright side

The writing and the messages in the book are not subtle. Lola has been abused in every imaginable way—the litany is overwhelming. Her downward spiral is relentlessly dark, while the happy-sunshiny scenes with her infant nephew and her lover, Paul, can be maudlin.

Paul especially is too good to be true. His entry into Lola’s life is overly serendipitous and he’s infinitely patient with Lola’s freak-outs. He does, however, make a significant contribution to the story: Paul’s hippie-dippy quest for self-knowledge provides a faint hope that lune society could change.

Benighted is not the typical werewolf novel that’s flooded the market recently. I imagine it could be shelved under literary fiction, science fiction, or horror. Like my favorite speculative fiction, Benighted alters today’s world just enough to create pointed social commentary, and it’s refreshing to see writing that makes me empathize with a challenging character. The dénouement is rather a let-down, much like a mystery in which on the last page the sleuth deduces the presence of some unseen hand directing the action. However, the provocative climax is what’s stayed with me.

Grade: B for Lola's melodramas, the "unseen hand" ending, and some clunkiness in describing her relationships. An A for an interesting voice, a fascinating world, and a provocative, memorable story. Overall, A-/B+.

All right, all right, all right

2007-11-29T23:36:00.000-05:00

Several of you lovely people have let me know that I've been absent too long. Thanks for thinking of me. I plead technical difficulties and flu, but you're quite right, it's time to get back to it.

Mr Sneeze and Mr Cough have been keeping me busy. The only book I've read lately is Jo Beverley's Devilish, from the Malloren series set in Georgian England.

I chose Devilish out of convenience (I could reach it without getting out of bed), but I greatly enjoyed it. I've read it before, and found it every bit as interesting this time around. Reading it a page or two at a time, with occasional backtracking, gave it a feeling akin to the "slow read" done in rehearsing a stage play. It's the most detailed read I've given a book in a while, and it got the book thoroughly stuck in my head.

If you haven't read the Malloren books, I suggest starting with the first one--the youngest brother's story, My Lady Notorious. The middle books didn't speak to me quite the same way, but they set the stage intriguingly for Devilish. For me, Devilish is the "keeper" in the series--it has a great combination of intelligent, passionate characters, bizarre historical figures, and consistent pacing.

I'd like to write more about the Malloren books some other time. Right now I'm going to be expedient and dig up some book reviews I have sitting around. That should entertain you impatient types.

Horror films: The funny kind (II)

2007-10-25T01:38:00.000-04:00

On Amazon:
• Ed Wood
• Plan 9 from Outer Space

Last post, I mentioned two comic horror films that I recently enjoyed. For Halloween night I've lined up two more:
• Ed Wood and
• Plan 9 from Outer Space.

That should keep us entertained between trick-or-treaters.

If you haven't seen these, I highly recommend them. Or rather, I highly recommend Ed Wood; I recommend Plan 9 in a "so bad it's good" vein. As always, have popcorn or other lightweight, nonstaining foodstuffs on hand to throw.

Ed Wood

Film producer Ed Wood, Jr. is best known for a string of B-movies in the 1950s. He wrote his own scripts, doubled as director/producer, and sometimes even took acting parts. Legend has it that he stretched his budget by stealing props from better-funded productions (notably a broken-down mechanical octopus).

Tim Burton's 1994 biopic Ed Wood tells part of Wood's story, including the filming of his (in)famous Plan 9 From Outer Space, his slapdash style as a director, his fetish for angora sweaters, and his friendship with Béla Lugosi.

Burton's take on Wood is sympathetic; Johnny Depp's Wood is an obsessive with a good heart. Martin Landau's Lugosi is doddering but he comes to life (so to speak) when talking about his glory days as Count Dracula. The friendship between the two men adds some sweet moments to the film; it's not all laughs.

Here's the 1994 trailer:
[NOTE: The video sometimes migrates to the end of the post. It's cursed.]

Plan 9 from Outer Space

Some of the funniest moments in Ed Wood are about the filming of Plan 9 From Outer Space. If you enjoy sheer silliness, I highly recommend Plan 9 (especially after Ed Wood). It's remarkable how well Ed Wood depicted Plan 9, how believable Landau is as Lugosi, and how silly the hubcap-flying saucers look during filming.

I don't think I can describe Plan 9 better than this review by Amazon.com staff:

Plan 9 is the story of space aliens who try to conquer the Earth through resurrection of the dead. Psychic Criswell narrates ("Future events such as these will affect you in the future!") as police rush through the cemetery, occasionally clipping the cardboard tombstones in their zeal to find the source of the mysterious goings-on.

More than just a bad film, Plan 9 is something of a one- stop clearinghouse for poor cinematic techniques: The time shifts whimsically from midnight to afternoon sun, Tor Johnson flails desperately in an attempt to rise from his coffin, and flying saucers zoom past on clearly visible strings. Fading star Bela Lugosi tragically died during filming, but such a small hurdle could not stop writer-producer-director Ed Wood. Lugosi is ingeniously replaced with a man who holds a cape across his face and might as well have "NOT BELA LUGOSI" stamped on his forehead.

Plan 9 is so sweetly well-intentioned in both its message and its execution that it's impossible not to love it. And if you don't, well, as Eros says, "You people of Earth are idiots!" --Ali Davis

All that, and a great trailer!

Horror films: The funny kind

2007-10-24T02:43:00.001-04:00

On Amazon:
• Creature from the Haunted Sea
• Bloody Pit of Horror

Every October I get into a Halloween mood by screening comic horror films. Friends and neighbors bring camp chairs and extra popcorn (as most of what I provide gets hurled at the screen).

So far this month I've shown two films:
• Creature from the Haunted Sea and
• Bloody Pit of Horror.

I discovered both through The It's Alive Show's webcast (which I found via Lucy Snyder). I wish the It's Alive crew all the best this week as they defend their Guinness World Record for Largest Zombie Walk... and I hope they'll webcast it.

These films' effect is sheer comedy. They're complete failures on the horror front, and they don't fail quietly either; these films pull out all the stops.

Creature from the Haunted Sea

Creature from the Haunted Sea is a half-serious, half-slapstick crime-castaway-monster movie with rampant Bogart parody and a pathetically homemade monster.

The setting is the Caribbean, just after the Cuban Revolution. Several former Cuban military officers abscond with a strongbox from the Cuban treasury, and hire a Sicilian-American mafioso's boat for their getaway. The mobster and his moll decide to scuttle the boat, blame the Cubans' deaths on a sea monster, and keep the money. All goes well until the real sea monster gets in on the scheme.

Roger Corman (Little Shop of Horrors) filmed Creature in five days, augmenting it with spare footage and dialogue from a different film. Boy, does it show. The opening scenes are in a satirical hard-boiled style, complete with awful tough-guy dialogue. Many of the island scenes are spoofs of The African Queen. The only connection between the Cuba scenes and the shipwreck/monster scenes is some intermittent tough-guy narration by an incompetent American spy. And the Creature itself looks like Cookie Monster's senile great-uncle, made from:

a wetsuit, some moss, lots of Brillo pads.... Tennis balls for the eyes, Ping-Pong balls for the pupils and pipecleaners for the claws.

What caps Creature's perfect absurdity is the quirky soundtrack by Fred Katz, a jazz cellist [audio] and composer of space age pop. Katz scored several of Corman's films, including Little Shop of Horrors. The soundtrack is especially engaging during the credits, which feature odd animations of monsters and revolutionaries.

Here's the 1961 trailer:

Bloody Pit of Horror

Bloody Pit of Horror (originally Il Boia Scarlatto, or The Crimson Executioner) is badly dubbed, badly acted, badly written, and badly filmed. There isn't a single atmospheric moment in the movie; the writing, acting, and costuming are overwrought but completely unaffecting. It's insanely bad; perfect for throwing popcorn.

The plot is bad gothic. A group of models and photographers stay at a castle, posing among cheesy torture devices. The castle's owner is fascinated and appalled by the models; he fears his desire will taint his body. The solution? He obsessively oils his chest for several minutes, then dons a silly mask, dubs himself the Crimson Executioner, and starts strapping people into giant spider webs and beds of nails.

Between the Crimson Executioner's (Mickey Hargitay's) well-oiled bare chest, the strangely sex-slave-looking henchmen, and the general air of wannabe sexploitation, the film's look is closer to colorized softcore porn than horror. Not that it's sexy either. Not horrific, not atmospheric, not sexy, and it lacks the dippy charm of Creature from the Haunted Sea... but the ineptitude of the film is a crack-up. I wouldn't have missed it.

Here's the 1965 trailer:

There's some confusion over exactly who directed Bloody Pit--Massimo Pupillo (perhaps under his pseudonym Max Hunter), or perhaps Ralph Zucker, or someone else entirely. There's even speculation that Pupillo was mortified by the quality of the film, and asked to be removed from the credits. I know, I know, it's just internet conspiracy theory, but the film is pretty mortifying. Especially as Pupillo apparently had a strong reputation as a subtle and atmospheric director--not a description that applies to this film.

Next screenings in my silly-horror-fest: Ed Wood and Plan 9 From Outer Space!