point of view solves everything, but you need an awareness of how point of view works in order to deploy it as a solution
one of the things pov "solves" is tone: but b/c of that, tone gets shaky if your grasp of pov becomes shaky
point of view solves everything, but you need an awareness of how point of view works in order to deploy it as a solution
one of the things pov "solves" is tone: but b/c of that, tone gets shaky if your grasp of pov becomes shaky
new genre fiction complaint (not about any books I've recently mentioned here): pov that is otherwise tight third person that deploys adjectives that are very unlikely for the character to use or, even more likely, isn't even aware of b/c to them it wouldn't be notable at all
I'm finding the reviews of Stepanova's The Disappearing Act quite disappointing, primarily because they all seem to want to engage w/just one or two parts of the book; whereas, its' trick (heh) is all of the pieces: Tarot, Russia, the circus, travel, the EU's cultural industry, childhood, etc.
Exactly
_Lee told me that she read an eyepopping 50 books in 2024_
Eyepopping?
Do culture writers just not read books anymore?
I also don't think you read it as allegory--you read the it as a novel with a plot, as events happening to the novelist not as allegory, but as things that happen to the novelist in a way that she reacts to and/or processes as a novelist.
I'm finding the reviews of Stepanova's The Disappearing Act quite disappointing, primarily because they all seem to want to engage w/just one or two parts of the book; whereas, its' trick (heh) is all of the pieces: Tarot, Russia, the circus, travel, the EU's cultural industry, childhood, etc.
Love this: "In the process, I’ll say a bit more about social science in general because part of my ulterior motive (mwa ha ha) is to experiment with the idea of SFF as a form of (social) science rather than an uncanonical and marginalised field of ‘Literature’."
Eliane Radigue's Kyema (part one of Trilogie De La Mort) is most like the experience of reading a difficult novel: you can only judge it by listening to it all the way through, but it's so long & proceeds w/such subtle gradations you can't judge the whole, but only your experiencing of the whole.
The source on this is a 2022 thesis by University of Toronto graduate Nathaniel Harrington. I will likely talk about a section at the end of it in my next newsletter b/c it's about SF&F criticism and comparative literature as "anxious": utoronto.scholaris.ca/items/ef176e...
the fascination of trifles; the enchantment of frivolity; the spell of worthless things; the seduction of nonsense; the charm of idle pursuits; the lure of empty pleasures; the enticement of meaningless diversions; the allure of trivial things; the spell of slight things
dinner theater for all!
... that are leveled at fantasy and science fiction, there is in fact something profoundly political (although the details of its political thrust may vary) at work in speculative fiction of all kinds, something that we would do well to attend to. _
_That this affirmation, grounded in Le Guin’s anarchist politics, so closely echoes the language of Mark Fisher’s Deleuzian Marxism, Unamuno’s “radical” liberalism, and J.R.R. Tolkien’s
reactionary Catholicism suggests that for all the accusations of escapism (assumed to be apolitical) ...
purely hypothetical <wink>, but what if I wrote a contemporary lit fic novel *as if* I were writing SF&F?
I have to take pip adams's audition in as small sips, like it's some scalding broth that's almost been over-reduced
[me predicting my reaction to nolan's the odyssey or the most obscure sponcon of all time?]
wine dark sea of vinegar
I started a romantasy where the author seemed to know their worldbuilding was shaky so they put a lampshade on it only to note a few pages later that the lampshade didn't work.
Also: the protag was not taking obvious precautions & just shrugged their shoulders when things inevitably went wrong.
Ah, that's too bad!
I feel like it really went under the radar.
The extent to which Target has extinguished local pride in them cannot be underestimated.
When I moved here in the mid-2000s, to work there was a point of pride & everyone shopped there. It was the default gift card you got at work for a gift exchange or whatever.
That's completely changed.
If we are friends and you are local to me, I can also lend you the blu-ray of it.
A reminder that you can likely view this film, which features narration by Tilda Swinton and an amazing soundtrack, on Kanopy if you're in the U.S. and part of a library system that uses Kanopy (or attend or work for a college/university).
I'm both happy to be aware of this lost episode and sad that it never happened.
[please note that I have never engaged in fisticuffs in my life & I do agree that _Tone_ is best reduced down to the word atmosphere even if the exercise of doing so & the other words grasped for in doing so in the book are valuable: wmhenrymorris.com/nonfiction/T... ]
This was fantastic and on a subject close to my heart.
Dan & I may need to engage in fisticuffs over his reduction of Samatar & Zambreno's _Tone_ down to atmosphere, but I also admit: attitude, atmosphere, vibes, the view from the window--discussing tone is difficult.
Is Babak Jalali's Fremont (2023) weird fiction? More importantly, what if we view it as such? What, esp., if we viewed the Jarmusch-ness of it as critique rather than homage?
I'm too close to the East Bay-ness of it for a proper analysis. But these are the questions that popped up after viewing it.
14 ON MORRISON At the same time, both writers willfully, sometimes irrepressibly, penned rather difficult prose. I'm a full professor of English with tenure at Harvard University, and I'm not ashamed to admit that it took me at least three readings to comprehend Beloved at even a basic level. There are passages in Morrison's works that no reader I've ever met understands on the first go. But this literary difficulty was neither aesthetically coy nor glibly aspirational. It was an ethos. Morrison's insistence on making us puzzle things out was an attempt to effect, she said, an "egalitarianism that places us all (reader, the novel's population, the narrator's voice) on the same footing." This democratic orientation to the work doesn't pander. Morrison doesn't condescend to your level; she challenges you to rise to hers. "My writing expects, demands participatory reading," she said. "My language has to have holes and spaces so that the reader can come into it." In other words, this ambiguity has a purpose. The point is that we cannot know, we cannot judge-and sometimes the point is that there are ways of doing both that allow contradictions to coexist. Morrison believed that literary form could instantiate philosophical ideas of this kind. As she said of William Faulkner: "The structure is the argument." As she wrote of Mark Twain: "The brilliance of Huckleberry Finn is that it is the argument it raises."
Sound the productive ambiguity klaxons
