Reduced to Summary

On February 10, a book blogger wrote a post dissecting some of my reviews at Locus, mostly of books by people of color. She discerned a pattern in my reviews that indicated racial prejudice. I believe that she called me out usefully on some mistakes, and that she otherwise selectively read and quoted me in ways that misrepresent my body of work. 

This was all ignited because I reviewed the second volume of an epic fantasy series without reading the first volume. That choice infuriated readers and book bloggers, whose attitude toward books differs in significant ways from that of book critics. One blogger decided to look closer at my work, and these two issues - my purported racial prejudice and my choice to start with book two of a series - got conflated, when I'm not sure even the blogger intended that. 

There's a great deal to be said about all this. The question of whether it should be a requirement to read books in series from the get-go in order to assess later books is an interesting one, when I stand back from it. Up close, the philosophy dissolves. For a few days I was a useful strawman for a lot of necessary arguments on Twitter about book criticism, even though I don't believe everything that's been said about my work and my critical posture is accurate or even helpful. I'm glad that my work has stirred up conversation about diversity in publishing, even as I'm devastated about being the subject of so much wrath. 

I think I became a target for everyone who is mad about authority imbalances in book criticism. I respect that, but given how little I'm paid and how little I'm known, I find this silly. Hitting me is not really punching up for almost anyone. 

I drafted a very long blog post explaining what I think and feel about this whole incident, how painfully it hits me given my history with race and racism, and some of the personal and professional aftermath. Ultimately, I don't think it's useful to make public. The above is all I want to say for now. 

Also, there's a lot more for me to tell you. 

Electric Dreamhouse Press, a UK publisher headed by my friend Neil Snowdon, is going to publish my second book this year as part of their line of Midnight Movie Monographs. My monograph is about Ed Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space. I wrote this short book in the space of about six weeks in mid-2020, and I haven't had such fun writing a book since Highbinder (which still languishes, alas). I'm really pleased about joining the small but scrappy field of Ed Wood studies. 

The book contains my central arguments about why it's worthwhile to study bad film. I've been building on those arguments to write a series of essays that I hope will be a whole book about bad film, eventually. I've written about Ruby (1977) and about a series of 1940s films starring "the Teen-Agers," and up next is Death Bed: The Bed that Eats. Other essays will be on Cop Rock, Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman, and a tricky dual piece about Showgirls and Staying Alive. I'm ahead of the schedule I made for these essays, which feels good. 

However, I keep getting intuitive signals to work on the Casablanca novel, which has been at a bare simmer in the back of my head for years. Last night I attended a reading with Lance Olsen and Lidia Yuknavitch, and something Olsen said temporarily turned up the heat on that burner. I've made a very tentative plan to write that book once I'm finished with the bad film essays - sometime in the fall, ideally - but if this keeps up, I'll have to pause the bad film essays and set to the novel. I simultaneously feel excited about the project (I haven't written a novel in years) and preemptively annoyed. It's going to be so much work. 

Anyway: the Plan 9 book represents pure joy for me, as it was an intellectual problem which I got to solve to my satisfaction. That the result will be a book (and a beautiful book at that, given EDP's past performance) is extra whipped cream on an already-nice sundae. I found out about the Midnight Movie Monographs series around three years ago, and idly wondered what movie I could write about for 100 pages. My mind supplied Plan 9 from Outer Space, and even though it was a weird choice, the more I thought about it, the more I supposed I could do it. How would I write 100 pages about Plan 9? Well, last year, I wrote until I found out. Thankfully, Neil was interested in what I produced. 

Both of my first two books, as it turns out, will be about weirdnesses my mind picked up and played around with, private obsessions I never thought would go public. Of everything I've written, these two books are the most fringely me, and I'm bemused that they are the two going out to bookstores in bound form. I think this means you ought to write what you love, or at least that I ought to write what I love. 

As for the third book, I recently made a (digital) handshake agreement with Blue Arrangements to publish my conceptual novel, Victorian Spam. It's a tee-tiny press, just two people, and all of us are burdened by lives and jobs and other projects, so we are all taking a relaxed attitude to the timeline of this book. I estimate that it'll appear in 2022, and it, too, is super weird. Yay! 

None of these three books has anything to do with any of the others. Ceremonials is lyric fiction, Plan 9 is straight nonfiction, and Victorian Spam is...other. All of them are ekphrastic in some way, and I created all of them, but those are the only two elements I can think of that they have in common. 

As for the fourth book...I finally, finally, finally finished the Misfits essay back in December. A couple of weeks later, I got an important blessing from one of the real-life characters in the essay. Thus, Weird New Shit, my book of hybrid film essays, is really truly completed. It's taken me four or five years to write and assemble these essays, which is four or five times longer than I usually work on a book, so I'm thrilled to be done. I'm shopping it to a few presses I think will like it before I try agents, and have consequently racked up a few rejections. 

I don't think there'll be news on that one for some time yet. My expectations for it are so large and unrealistic that it's probably better to let it settle as a project before it goes into the world, anyway. But I do suspect it'll be the fourth book. Mostly I'm glad to be done. 

Somehow I never put it on the blog that an essay of mine was published online at Conjunctions a few months ago. It's called "All Cities Burn" and when I shared it in November, I said I thought it was the best thing I've ever written. These days, with so many different projects coming to fruition, I don't really know if that assessment has meaning. Read it and let me know what you think. Maybe the most arresting thing I've ever written? Either way, being in Conjunctions is an honor. 

While I was struggling through the emotional aftermath of the February 10 incident, I started cross-stitching tiny portraits of the horses I work with. I've made about a dozen, using various patterns and editing them as needed to communicate what the horses look like (and act like), and have a couple more to go. My plan is to give these to the owners of these horses as parting gifts; I've given my notice at the barn, and will be stopping work there within the next month or so, I hope. I'm sorry to go, but the work is tearing up my body, and I'm turning 40 this year - too old to withstand another summer like 2020's. 

The one portrait I can't seem to settle on how to make is for Quinn, a gorgeous Friesian cross who is smart and eager and generally a lovely horse once he gets out of his anxious head. But he almost never succeeds in doing that. I love him so much and will miss him so much and I don't know how to capture him in cross-stitch without doing a massive, photorealistic portrait, much bigger than 3 inches wide. I don't have time for that. But how can I sum him up in such a small space? 

How can any of us, horse or human, be reduced to summary? 

See Me Now?

I am so tired of year-end roundups of books that I could start screaming and never stop, like that guy who cracks in Real Genius.

Seriously. I had no idea how many of them there were until this year, when paying attention to them is kind of part of my job, but now I feel like I'm drowning in them. And what good do they do? So often they're just composed of all the same books I heard about ad nauseam this year. I wish all the best to the authors of these books, really I do, but if I read one more article that gushes over The Incendiaries, The Third Hotel, and The Great Believers, I'm going to, well,

I could write a very long list of things I learned this year as a writer. I think I picked up about 100 bylines, based on inexact estimates, and that's a lot to learn from. I got into too many arguments, and I made some wonderful connections, and I alienated a nonzero number of people, unfortunately. I went to book parties and I joined Twitter and I wrote for outlets I've been wanting to write for since I was in my mid-twenties. I felt lucky and cursed, miserable and exhilarated. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. But there's just one thing I want to write about today: using the first person in book reviews.

I've never believed that subjectivity in the majority of writing types is a bad thing. The only places to preserve objectivity are textbooks or journalism: areas where the meretricious struts of objectivity are necessary or the infrastructure crumbles. For nearly everything else, I find it pretty important to remember the existence, the bias, the shades and emotions of the genuine human being who's composing the words you're reading. Hi, here I am.

In my reviews, I turn to the first person when I want to offer my subjective experience of reading the book. Again, I see nothing wrong with this. When I read poetry and have a hard time with it, I want you to know that. I hope my first-person truth-telling will make other readers who have a hard time with poetry feel less alone, and help them choose to forge on with reading poetry anyway (because if a reviewer has a hard time with it, what do you have to be discouraged about?). A few of my editors, though, have flagged my dips into the first person and asked me to remove them. It took time and guidance for me to understand why instead of getting defensive.

A great example of why came from a review that was just published yesterday, of Adam Nemett's We Can Save Us All. In the second paragraph, the finished review reads:

David, the main narrator, is a bit of a misstep; in his ordinariness and insecurity, he is inadequate to the task of anchoring this wild, funny book. 

While my original draft read:

David, the main narrator, is a bit of a misstep; in his ordinariness and insecurity, I found him inadequate to the task of anchoring this wild, funny book. 

In my draft, I wrote this judgment in the first person because I'm not sure that every reader will find David inadequate. It felt harsh to indicate that. I'm a critic, but I'm one reader, and I'm willing to bet that readers who resemble David more than I do will find him more adequate than I did. And his ordinariness and insecurity are part of the point; I think it's still way too big a book for such a schlub to be the center of, but I do see why Nemett did it that way. The point is, I felt like I was opening myself to more hostility by using definite language (here's how it is) than by using subjective language (here's how I found it). I think I'm right but I'm willing to be wrong, and I don't want to stamp out other readers' points of view. The first person demonstrates that efficiently.

My editor pointed out that subjectivity weakens the certainty of the passage, and thus of the review in general. It's like using seems instead of is: weaseling out of saying what you really mean. This is true. It just is. Without definite statements instead of "I think/I feel" statements, criticism has no air of authority. Thus, first person should be used sparingly, or not at all, if the critic is going to maintain her authority as a critic.

But I am dubious about saying that any single critic's opinion is the only way to receive a given book. As one of my teachers said, if everyone in the room has the same thing to say about a book, it's a dead piece of literature. So to say that how I received the book is how I received the book, rather than how the book definitively is, feels more correct, kinder, fairer.

And I know I don't know everything about reading, writing, or reviewing. Without some subjectivity, I start to sound like a know-it-all, or a snob, or worse.

Still. My editors are right. Criticism is messy and unconvincing with too much subjectivity. I keep seeking the right balance of I and you, of critic and reader, with some author thrown in there, too. Without that balance, criticism feels either too limp or too steely. I am a good enough reader to suss out what an author is doing most of the time, but I don't want to lose track of the flawed and biased person who's reading, or start proclaiming myself the Great and Powerful Oz of book critics. That's not in anyone's best interests, not readers nor writers. Nor me.

For more subjective opinions, see below.

Out in the world:

I reviewed Anne Boyer's bring-you-to-your-knees essay collection A Handbook of Disappointed Fate for the Los Angeles Review. It's too, too good. And this review is very subjective, but hopefully in an authoritative way.

For Locus, I reviewed the third book in B. Catling's well-received Vorrh trilogy. I read all 1,400 pages of this trilogy in a week, and I know the overload involved there is not the only reason I fucking hated the books. I was on pins and needles the last couple of months waiting for this review to go on the website, because I am so proud of pointing out the sick colonialism and the dark, hideous horrors of these books. If you haven't read one of my reviews in a while, read this one.

I reviewed a short novel that seemed to come and go quickly despite being a lyrical wonder, Alyson Hagy's Scribe, for the Carolina Quarterly. The editor there is super nice and we're going to be working together at least a couple more times in the coming months.

I did a breathless three-minute review of a second PANK chapbook, Stacy Austin Egan's You Could Stop It Here, which was very good, for Pleiades. I hugely enjoy this format.

I feel bad about giving a net negative review to Hollywood vs. the Author, a collection of essays about writers in Hollywood, because it's the first book I've reviewed for Rare Bird and I really like the people at that press and the work they're doing. But the book had obvious flaws. What are you gonna do?

Also for Book and Film Globe, I wrote a snarktastic piece about the video for Ariana Grande's "Thank U, Next," which pissed me off. My take pissed off some other people. Oh, well. My editor at that site is assigning me almost everything I pitch, so there will be much more to come there.

Finally, I wrote an essay about writing without pay that I posted (...behind a paywall) at Medium. If you find it interesting, I'd appreciate a share.

The Book Arbiter

Suspicious fish is suspicious

I'd like to caption the above with "every book critic ever" 

I've been meaning for a while to write about this essay, "The Movie Assassin," which got a fair amount of attention when it came out at the end of September. I've read widely varied reactions to this article, from total angry dismissal to "I feel seen." I loved it, found it worth reading repeatedly, considered what it meant to me in multiple dimensions, still am not sure that I've written, below, everything I have to say and think about it.

The main thing the essay made me want to repeat is how important I find it not to go with the flow of the crowd when writing criticism. 27-year-old Sarah didn't like The English Patient perhaps for immature reasons, but twenty years later, she has the language to express what's wrong with it, and in my view it's the same thing that's wrong with a lot of prestige pictures: it's not good just because a preponderance of influential people say it is.

Everyone had agreed to care about this thing, to call it good, to give it nine Academy Awards. But it was just a piece of shit sprinkled with glitter that everyone, including me, agreed to call gold.

Opinions like this (that The English Patient is bad) are difficult to defend. They make people mad who are deeply invested in everyone agreeing on what's gold and what isn't. They can be easily dismissed because they're fringe, because the rest of the crowd disagrees. They are problematic for people who are easily occupied or entertained by essentially mediocre art.

Which is most people, in fact - and I don't say that with any insult in my heart. Mediocre art needs an audience and the audience needs mediocre art. Sometimes I need to watch Easy A instead of Wild Strawberries. But I know that most people are going to like Easy A more than Wild Strawberries, because the latter is much harder to like, and is reaching out to a narrower shred of the audience.

The moment now strikes me as so incredibly East Coast—this notion of consensus—which I would later run away from, and then, in a strange way, miss.

All this background is important when writing criticism, I believe. It's the reason that, even though I understand a hell of a lot more about movies than I understand about books, I don't want to write film reviews (anymore; I used to want it more than anything). It's why I don't like talking with friends about movies, for the most part. If someone asks me what I think of this or that, I don't want to tell them, because the answer will likely make the person's mouth turn down or their brow furrow. American film of the 2010s generally isn't that good, because the camerawork is pedestrian and the screenplays are impossibly safe and the characters are circumscribed and technology makes them aesthetically lazy. I see these flaws, just for starters, in virtually every movie. If you ask me if I saw a given movie, I would so much rather say no than yes, because no continues the conversation, and yes is likely to kill it.

I would be a miserable sod as a film critic, not because I don't like movies (I adore them), and not because I want to be a killjoy (I prefer to cheer for people's art), but because I know too much about movies to be anything but cynical about contemporary American film.

Every time I thought about the fact that other people all over the city were reading it, I would shake my head and try to think about something else. When I walked by the theater and saw people in line to see it, I felt sick.

The review for which I felt this go-with-the-flow problem most keenly was for Belly Up, which I reviewed on assignment for LARB in May. I knew, from the hype it was getting and various indications in the text, that it was likely to be a big hit critically. I knew I couldn't fake a good opinion of it, and I thought I was way too early in my critical career to be doing that, anyway. So I told the truth and said that, even though the book was compact and well-executed, I found it chilly and distant, that there was no human spark in the stories.

And I felt bad about it for weeks. I didn't want the author to think I was being mean for no reason. I didn't want to negatively impact her career or readers' opinions of her book. I didn't want my review to be the reason she sold even one fewer copy of her book. But I was assigned to review the book and I had to do it truthfully.

If you write thousands of sentences that have absolutely nothing to do with what you think or feel those sentences are still what you will become. You can turn yourself into another person. I turned myself into another person.

I had a different crisis in reviewing CoDex 1962. It was the standard-issue who-do-I-think-I-am crisis, the one where this book has been lauded all over the world and it's a twenty-year achievement by an acknowledged young master of literature, and I'm a little baby critic who didn't really think the trilogy was a trilogy so much as it was three books pushed together, and the last one was maybe a little hastily written? to finish a trilogy the writer had lost enthusiasm for or moved creatively away from?, so I wrote a lot of weasel words like seems and I think, but my editor would have none of that. He said I praised the book enough in other paragraphs that I could ding it a few times without sounding like a jerk. I wasn't necessarily worried about sounding like a jerk; I was worried about sounding like I didn't know what I was talking about.

But I'm fairly sure I do. Just because every critic in the world was falling all over themselves to love CoDex 1962 didn't mean I ought to ignore my reservations about it. I didn't trick LARB into accepting that review (it was another assignment, in fact). They wanted my words. I had to offer them truthfully.

It was the best thing I’d ever written.

I think the error comes in believing that because other people are reading and/or purchasing your criticism, you are automatically correct in any given opinion. That because I write book criticism, I am The Book Arbiter, that I know for good and all what people should enjoy and what they shouldn't. I don't believe that, because I don't believe "should" is how audience enjoyment works. My opinion of 2010s cinema is not correct for the vast majority of moviegoers alive today. It would be irresponsible of me to write that opinion down as reasonable criticism, even if I do think I'm right. I'm a critic, and proud of my work as a critic, but I'm not an arbiter. I don't believe any single critic is, or should be.

The audience is the only arbiter that matters.

It took Sarah Miller twenty years to reaffirm her opinion of The English Patient. It's interesting to me that this was the book/movie she chose to make her point, because my opinion of the source book is extremely unusual for a heavy reader: I can't stand it. If given the opportunity, I would bow out of reviewing it, because I don't understand what it's doing well enough to form a reasonable or useful opinion on it. This happened to me earlier in the year with Sarah Vap's Viability, to which I had the opposite reaction. I loved it, but didn't understand at all. After a few months of trying to write the review I apologized and tapped out. Embarrassing, but better than lying.

I knew there were people who made money saying things they thought were actually true, or important, but I figured I wasn’t good enough to do that, because otherwise, people wouldn’t keep asking me to write stupid stuff.

Of the movie The English Patient I don't have much of an opinion, except that I liked it more than the book. Maybe Sarah's right, and it's a pretentious, very pretty piece of fluff. It wouldn't be the first time I thought that about a well-lauded film. 

---

Some sad stuff has happened this week. My husband's uncle (his mother's sister's husband) has passed away after a short illness. We subsequently had to cancel a family get-together for this weekend that we'd all been looking forward to. Plus, the week in public life has been very cruel.

But there's plenty of good news in my life (and I'll bet in yours too). My review of Tommy Orange's nominated-for-everything There There appeared in the Times! Literary! Supplement! on November 2. Here's a link, but it's behind a subscription wall. Also, I went to a cool event over the weekend and met some new and interesting L.A. book people.

I wanted to let you know, those of you who get my blog posts via email, that the traffic might increase unpleasantly soon. I am doing a project to track all the work I do on a weekly basis as a freelancer, and the best place I know to record all that tracking is here, on my blog. I'll post that progress until someone yells at me to stop or it's no longer useful. Until then --

What Not to Do if You're Butthurt and Other Stories

Here are a few mini-blog posts, instead of one coherent one, because that is what I have for you.

(1) I woke up this morning thinking about public figures who are not universally admirable - a consequence of reading this post, which had a sort of eternal-mirror effect on me, as I'm close to removing that blog from my reading list because I find the writer increasingly combative, and so while I don't have the same relationship with the writer of that blog that the writer of that blog has with the subject of that blog post, it's still kind of ironic. Dontcha think?

I considered writing my own post about how I cope with public figures I admire but do not like, but after I looked at the comments on Jenny's post and found that "people we admire usually aren't everything we want them to be" is not in fact the great new lesson that I thought it was - because I learned it on my own, through experience, without being taught it by a parent or a mentor or an article on Medium.com, and hence thought it was worth sharing as if it was new - I decided to save that musing for a time when it's somehow more relevant. Anais Nin, Richard Nixon, and yes, Amanda Palmer: these are people who are not everything I want them to be (or sometimes almost nothing I want them to be), but whom I still admire. Another time I'll tell you why.

Yes, I admire Richard Nixon.

There are so many good Deal With It pics that I pretty much died trying to pick one

(2) This weekend I finished Absalom, Absalom!, and I hope there are few books more momentous, more sublime, to come in my lifetime. I don't think my heart can take many more. It was SO HARD, you guys, it was harder than Remembrance of Things Past (or the first three volumes anyway) and way harder than Moby-Dick, but it was better than almost any book I've ever read.

I don't know why.

I can't distill for you why, for me, it built to such a pitch that I thought my head might pop like a grape before I was finished putting all of its words through my eyes, nor why even for all that I couldn't understand exactly what happened in the last major set piece. (Thank Christ for SparkNotes.) It was like the dead middle of The Sound and the Fury, two or three of my favorite pages in all literature, except bigger and badder, and for a stretch of many more pages. It reminded me of a film, Ordet, which is so difficult as to be almost unwatchable but which I always list as one of my favorite films. It gave me a set of thoughts and sensations that no other film has ever given me. Absalom, too, is so hard that I can't see myself recommending it, but I'll certainly put it up there on the list of the best books I know.

(3) Something happened in the videogame world that reflects very tidily on something I'm dealing with in my workshop class that I've been wanting to blog about. Jim Sterling, a critic for The Escapist, created a walkthrough review of the independent videogame The Slaughtering Grounds, giving it a poor grade. (That is, Sterling recorded his eye-view experience of playing the game and talked over the recording, discussing what he found was or wasn't working about it. Video here.) The developer, whose name does not seem to be a matter of public record, responded to this poor review by making a video with text annotations over Sterling's criticisms, explaining his intentions in making the game and why Sterling is a poopyface. This went about as well as you might expect. (Sterling's response to the response to the review is here. The dev's response to the response to the response to the review [yep] is here.)

Actually, same goes for this one - just Google Images "butthurt"

The central problem here is that you can't argue against someone's response to your art. You can't. You can't. You can talk about how your intentions may be different than the consequent experience of the art, but it's risky; I think the only contexts in which that works are a) if you need to improve the art, to make the experience jibe with your intentions, and you need more explicit feedback to do so, or b) you find it funny or interesting or instructive how the intentions and experiences don't match up and you want to share that. But it is not possible to defend against user experience. And most kinds of defending oneself against criticism sound terrible. They sound defensive and immature, almost universally. From the outside, even subtler ones than this dev's poorly spelled insults sound defensive and immature.

See, I couldn't even narrow it down to just one

It's particularly awkward in workshop, because there's nothing I know of that a writer can say about her intentions to which I won't respond with "Okay, but it needs to be on the page." If you get published, you can't go around to everybody in the world who's reading your story and stand over them and say what you meant by this or that. It has to be on the page. Matt's boss puts it even more succinctly: "You don't come in the box."

[by which he means a little version of the developer is not wrapped up with the game disc. perv.]

(4) My writing exercise this weekend went so much better than I expected that it put me in a good mood, which is such a rare event that I feel the need to record it. I keep waiting for a writing exercise to be good enough that I want to share it, but not so good that I want to keep it under my hat for revision, expansion, and potential submission. If that ever happens, I'll post it here. In the meantime, th-th-th-th-that's all, folks.

Various Benedictions

Finally, finally, finally, I wrote something over the weekend. On Saturday night, when I was all by myself. It's not the main idea I've been suckling for far too long, but an idea that occurred to me only a few weeks ago that was much easier to get at. It felt exhilarating going on the page, and I hope it'll feel that way when I pick it up again to revise after my mandatory two-week waiting period.

I've spoken before about how much of a relief it is to write when it's been a while since I've written. How my cup runneth over with anxiety that the machinery just won't start again, and how like a cool rain on a hot day it is when the words finally patter out in ink. Yes, it was the same way. And the resolutions were just the same, too; this time I'll keep up with writing at least some fiction at least once a week. Even if it's just an exercise. I will, I will. And, increasingly, I know this is a lie before the thought has even finished its circuit. (It must be like what alcoholics mutter to themselves in the harsh morning. This time I'll do it right. I won't fuck it up. I'll keep to the program. Oh, Christ, what'll I do?)

Aside from this writing goodness and...mixed emotional reaction, I got some very, very, very good news on Sunday: one of my shortest and most recently written stories has been accepted. At a literary magazine that is established enough to have a Wikipedia page and a couple thousand followers on Facebook. This may seem to be rather an empty honor to you, but to me it is a benediction from heaven.

Ah, how well you capture me, Mr. Lichtenstein

I'll keep you posted as to which magazine and what story when it appears. It is a pretty black tale (unsurprising, since I wrote it), but I had fun playing with the concept. It was the first story I've ever written into a final form and then rewritten from scratch, trying a whole different direction.

In social media news (shudder), I've opened my own Facebook page to followers. And consequently I'll try to write some public posts.

Have you read or seen the play or movie Proof? We just finished a unit on the play in my literature class, and I'm freakin' gobsmacked at it. Layers upon layers upon layers. The play has a precision that's just breathtaking as you circle closer to its heart. The movie is okay, but doesn't communicate this quality as well as reading the play does.

I recently read another book that I adored in exactly the opposite way: with my heart, my whole heart, instead of mostly my brain. It was Elizabeth Wein's Code Name Verity, a historical YA novel set in WWII - and two out of three of those criteria make the book really not my sort of thing at all. Still, I'll never look on its like again. What a treasure. I don't want to tell you about the time that my heart stopped and didn't really get going again for another two chapters, or the time I cried, or the other time I cried. It's all too spoilery. Just read it, one page at a time, and DON'T read the summary on the jacket.

Again an accurate depiction of my emotions

The tour de force of Code Name Verity was why the book I finished over the weekend was such a disappointment. Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, a finalist for the Booker and a big hoopdy-hoop book back in 2005, was an obvious allegory on the macro level and a pale copy of other IP I've encountered on the micro. It was written in a very simple and repetitive style, which was almost certainly part of the point re: the main characters, but the effect was dull and irritating. Everybody loved it, critically, and I'm at a total loss as to why. The YA book of the previous paragraph, which hasn't won anything like a Booker nom, was superior.

Do snooty lit critics just not read decent genre fiction? Ever? Because seemingly if you mix one mediocre speculative element into an otherwise very blah book by a big-name literary author, critics just seem to go insane. I can't think of other examples of this phenomenon right now, but I know I've read a couple. I want to grab these critics by their lapels and scream THIS ISN'T THAT GOOD, YOU DUMMIES. Read some damn Bradbury. Read some Valente. Read some Tobler. Read some LeGuin.

Haters Gonna Hate, Bullies Gonna Bull, Trolls Gonna Tro

Note: the links and video in this post are full of expletives and adult content - some of it vile, some of it hilarious. FYI. 

The end of July brought pretty lame news for creatives. An indie game developer, Phil Fish, got tired of taking abuse from various corners and announced that the game he was in the process of creating was going to be cancelled and that he was leaving videogames altogether. The games industry needs developers like Fish (creatively; not perhaps personally), and it's pretty ridiculous that haters drove him out.

He really just needed to look at this chart by Ann Friedman (click to embiggen).
It makes things so CLEAR. 

This article on the Penny Arcade Report is one of the best I ever expect to read about the ways in which superfluous negative criticism - a.k.a. trolling - subtracts from our lives. The toxicity of trolls feels to me like a kind of cosmic blowback from the no-tolerance-for-bullying thing that's swept American schools for the past few years. We'll just take it to the internet, the bullies bellow; you can't stop us there.

I was bullied a little bit in middle school. The thing I learned from this experience (along with "middle school sucks") is that nothing fucking works. Ignoring them doesn't work, because they escalate. Reporting them doesn't work, because they will find you alone, and they'll escalate until they get your attention. Responding in kind doesn't work, because then you're a jerk too. Plus, they escalate, and you'll both get bloody noses. Making them think usually doesn't work, because people don't bully with their brains. Humiliating them from your place on the high road is pretty much the only thing I know that works, and hoo mama is it tricky.

Upsetting as it was at the time, I remember only sketches of the bullying I underwent then. I remember better something that happened in a community college bookstore about five years ago. I had come straight from work, and I was wearing a button-down shirt that I liked a lot. It had wide, vertical black-and-white stripes, and the black was a little distressed and arty.

Two bookstore employees hanging around in the aisle made fun of me for wearing a shirt that looked like a referee's. Actually made fun of me, exactly the way you'd make fun of your little sister for a stupid-looking ponytail if you were ten. I was so amazed that this was possible in adult life that I muttered "thank you" several times (??) and got the fuck out of there. This still bothers me from time to time, not because they hurt my feelings and made me stop wearing that shirt forever after, but because it seemed so colossally dumb and bizarre to ridicule a grown woman, a stranger, for her clothing. What the hell were they thinking? Why??

Matt has tried to explain to me that trolls have a different thought process than you and me. That "why" doesn't really enter into it. That all they want is a reaction, any kind of reaction. Returning their abuse, killing them with kindness, and deletion all offer them satisfaction. Because each shows that you wasted a thought on them. Leaving aside how little I understand this, I find it pretty pathetic. Like Honey Boo Boo. A desperation for attention so all-devouring that it lowers every one of us into the muck.

On my last morning at Esalen, I had breakfast with a couple of ladies I hadn't talked to much before. One of them was around my age and the other was around my mom's age. I don't remember how it came into conversation, but I said that I didn't know how much of my motivation to write well and succeed should come from "I'll show 'em all." The woman my age nodded fervently, clearly grokking it even without what I was about to say, the explanation I was about to give: there are so many people I've encountered whom I want to look defiantly in the eye when I shake hands with an agent, or pick up the Sharpie to sign yet another book, or accept my National Book Award (and while I'm dreaming, I'd like a pony). So many people I think of when I write a really fine sentence and think See, fuck you, I'm worthwhile, and you'll be sorry you crossed me.

But even before I said any of that, the woman my mom's age said "Not even one bit of it. Don't waste your energy on showing anybody. People you have to show aren't worth a moment of effort."

She said it with such conviction. I'd heard this message before, but hadn't heeded it, as it's always seemed a bit like communism. A nice principle, but not one that is applicable in the petty, muddy, bloodily competitive human life I generally lead. Rugby on a rainy day doesn't coax the finest, highest thoughts out of most players. I've been using "I'll show 'em all" to motivate me from time to time, because I figure that at least it's something to motivate me, rather than just muddling about and hoping for the best. But the woman seemed to speak from experience. And the idea of showing 'em all does leave me kind of empty at the end of the day.

Of course, there's stuff like this (NSFW, but a must-watch):

I think "Thank You, Hater!" is a one-off, and taking this amount of time and energy to respond to trolls is really not a good idea on a regular basis. But oh, is it ever satisfying to watch.

Speaking of satisfying, if you ask me, Parker/Stone are kind of the last word on this whole question of what to do about people who tear you down for no apparent reason - bullies, haters, trolls, lesser rappers. This whole episode from season 16, "Butterballs," is worth watching for its insight on bullying, but this bit, at the end, is one of those moments that sticks after the satire fades.

If only Phil Fish could have seen this and taken it to heart before he gave up on his endeavors. Before he let them win.