Katharine Beutner's Blog, page 7

Follow-up on the Austen manuscript kerfuffle

Geoff Nunberg has a great post on Language Log today describing his response to Kathryn Sutherland's assertions about Austen's manuscripts and the role she suggests Gifford played in their editing. (The post is an annotated version of the piece he did for Fresh Air on the topic.) While the post starts off dramatically — "After looking over the Austen manuscripts online, I concluded that the whole business was meretricious nonsense" — Nunberg also speaks well of Sutherland's book, and concludes with a very satisfying explanation of changing patterns of semicolon usage. All worth a read.

Zadie Smith as obscure object of desire?

On Twitter today, I saw an approving link to Alexis Madrigal's response to Zadie Smith's fine essay on Facebook and The Social Network — the title of Madrigal's piece mentions literary writers and social media, and I'm always up for thinky writing about those things, so I spent some time reading it tonight when I really ought to have been dissertating. There are some assertions in the first part of the essay I disagree with, such as:

When professional writers, especially ones trained in the literary arts, see horrifically bad writing online, they recoil. All their training about the value of diverse (or, you know, heteroglossic) societies and the equality of classes goes flying out the window.

I'd like to see some evidence in support of the breadth of this generalization, and I'm not sure I agree, either, with some of the ways that Madrigal characterizes Smith's arguments. (There are a few comments on the essay that point out the fact that Smith was reviewing Lanier's book, not just citing it a lot.) But still, interesting stuff.

Then I got to the middle of the essay, and my head kind of exploded.

This middle section begins with a reasonable-sounding statement about the effects of fame on the way people engage with online communities:

Last idea: Smith is a celebrity, so she can't and won't ever have a normal social media presence. She could never just start a Twitter feed to post links to random stuff, nor a Facebook page where she receives updates on her niece. For example, this is what she wonders about the future Internet.

"Maybe it will be like an intensified version of the Internet I already live in, where ads for dental services stalk me from pillar to post and I am continually urged to buy my own books." [in Madrigal's post, the last phrase of this is italicized]

I don't quite agree with the main claim Madrigal's making here — of course a celebrity's non-anonymous experiences on the internet will differ from the average person's, but celebrities can still create anonymous Twitter accounts, or use their own named accounts, say, the way Margaret Atwood uses hers (mostly to post links to random stuff, in fact).  Still, fair enough — the quote from Smith's essay shows that her experience of the internet is influenced by her literary fame.

Then Madrigal begins describing his own memories of Smith's physical presence. Apparently he was a student of hers, and wants to reminisce at length about the effect her physical presence had on him (and his fellow college students, of course):

While other writing professors seemed to go out of their way to seem kind, Smith was detached and aloof. It made her almost impossibly attractive to the undergraduate population, male and female alike. She was a wonder. It is not surprising that she has to remain a mystery, lest the world drain her blood looking for her essence. We would shamble towards her — online or off — to feed. Her true location must remain secret.

I think that's a key part of her negative experience of Facebook. She trailed her beauty and brilliance with her, and experienced Facebook with their full weight pressing on her fingers and behind her eyes. Yet, it is precisely in the uniqueness of her experience of Facebook that shows that her fears will not be realized.

I'm hoping this is tongue-in-cheek — the vampire/zombie metaphors must be, but the second paragraph seems entirely earnest. Tonally, it's weird and frankly a little creepy, and it makes it hard for me to accept the reach for poeticism at the end of the essay. I was still stuck back in the middle of the piece, trapped with poor Zadie Smith and her shambling horde of admiring students, who speak with authority about how her aloof beauty must make her feel.

And here's my main question: what, precisely, does the author's memory of Smith's ineffable allure have to do with Smith's arguments about social media? She's too beautiful and mysterious to interact with social media the way the rest of us do? It's hard for her to reach the keyboard from all the way up there on that pedestal? Seriously?

I know the context is different, but I couldn't help thinking of Kate Beaton's recent request that (links go to a series of Twitter posts) fans stop expressing their appreciation for female comics creators by offering marriage, sexual favors, etc., even in jest. Her body/looks/femininity, she pointed out, have absolutely nothing to do with her talent as an artist, and there are plenty of lovely compliments fans could give that don't figure her as a sexual object. Predictably, Beaton got a lot of heat from fans for making this request. Many of them seemed to assume that she didn't understand that the fans offering to have her babies "weren't serious" or were just trying to be nice. And while I could see how her response might have seemed like an overreaction if it were prompted by one compliment of that sort, I'm guessing it's the accumulation and repetition that led her to speak up about it on Twitter, in hopes that fans would think about what compliments like that actually communicated to her and choose to say something else.

I wish Madrigal could have made a similar choice and responded to Smith's essay — to her ideas — without bringing her, physically, into the argument.

Writers' houses (and basements, and decks)

Today, an interesting essay by one of the Mailer fellows from the inaugural year of the Writers Colony — the same year I went to a week-long workshop there, on scholarship. I will admit that I didn't feel at all overawed by Mailer's house, or by any ghost of his presence, though I also didn't spend a lot of time writing there — I had a nice little scrubby beach-house apartment to myself that was much lighter, brighter, and quieter than Mailer's house. At the end of the week our group had a dinner party at Mailer's house, with the consent of the program administrators. We grilled on his deck, listened to his records, and drank wine in his dining room, and eventually we all ended up in the basement taking turns with his punching bag. I know there were members of our group for whom Mailer was a much bigger writing influence than he is for me, but none of us seemed to feel the way that Amy Rowland describes. So intriguing — how spaces strike people differently.

Also, via Alexander Chee, here is an amazing interview with Ray Bradbury at the Paris Review. I disagree tremendously with elements of it — not teaching kids math? not outlining? — but the ending of the piece is remarkable.

Facebook and its discontents

Zadie Smith's essay on The Social Network, Facebook, and Mark Zuckerberg in the NYRB is smart, surprising, and well worth reading. Especially this bit, in which she speculates about Zuckerberg's actual motivations (given that the invented dramatic motivations the film ascribes to him don't seem very accurate):

Maybe it's not mysterious and he's just playing the long game, holding out: not a billion dollars but a hundred billion dollars. Or is it possible he just loves programming? No doubt the filmmakers considered this option, but you can see their dilemma: how to convey the pleasure of programming—if such a pleasure exists—in a way that is both cinematic and comprehensible? Movies are notoriously bad at showing the pleasures and rigors of art-making, even when the medium is familiar.

I'm not a programmer, though I'm hoping to teach myself some Ruby this year. But I'd love to see a movie that could actually depict the pleasures of programming. It doesn't say much for Hollywood that the most earnest attempt at this so far was probably Hackers. (Wendell Pierce was in Hackers? Seriously? I must've been distracted by Angelina Jolie, though who wasn't.)

But this part of Smith's essay strikes the closest to home for me, at least, and perhaps for other people who live on the internet:

Shouldn't we struggle against Facebook? Everything in it is reduced to the size of its founder. Blue, because it turns out Zuckerberg is red-green color-blind. "Blue is the richest color for me—I can see all of blue." Poking, because that's what shy boys do to girls they are scared to talk to. Preoccupied with personal trivia, because Mark Zuckerberg thinks the exchange of personal trivia is what "friendship" is. A Mark Zuckerberg Production indeed! We were going to live online. It was going to be extraordinary. Yet what kind of living is this? Step back from your Facebook Wall for a moment: Doesn't it, suddenly, look a little ridiculous? Your life in this format?

I'll admit to never having figured out how to use Facebook in a way that makes me happy. I'm on it, I get sent messages through it by friends who use it more than I do, and I've been added by a lot of people from my high school. My page is pretty spare and I don't add a lot of personal information to it. I'm sort of glad it's there, glad to be connected in that small way to people I haven't seen for years. Every once in a while I go on and leave comments and look at other people's photos, but I don't live on it the way I know many of my students do. It's not my home on the internet. (Oddly enough, I feel much more comfortable with Twitter, probably because it isn't really a social network.) Then again, I haven't deleted my page, either, or whatever not-quite-as-permanent equivalent of deletion Facebook allows these days. I guess I'm all right with continuing to drift in the Facebook exurbs.

More links:

Heartening news from a school board election in Minneapolis (via Haddayr Copley-Woods).
A fascinating interview with Audrey Niffenegger.

Hey! Links.

I find it super-charming that the geeks behind Fallout New Vegas wrote Kate Beaton (patron comics saint of English and history geeks everywhere) into their game.

Tamil pulp fiction, now translated into English.

An interesting blog post on mechanical means of ensuring that more works of fiction and film pass the Bechdel test, written by a self-identified "registered Republican with a concealed-carry permit." I don't agree with everything in this post, but I do think that being aware of the context of your choices as a writer is always important, even when those choices seem as minor as deciding the gender of a parking attendant who makes a two-line appearance in your novel. And I think this sentence is worth thinking about in other contexts, too:

And if there's one thing I've taken away from the discussions of feminism and queer politics and anti-racism that I've read, it's that I don't have to agree with people to learn how they would like to be treated.

On a related note: a collection of signs from the Stewart/Colbert Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear.

And also related (if you squint), in that they are a means of sharing comfort and support: the best damn gluten-free cookies I've baked in my two years as a diagnosed celiac. Mine weren't vegan, and I made them with raisins instead of chocolate chips. Highly recommended, should you ever need to make GF cookies for yourself, or for a friend.

Fairy tales and the absurd (not at the same time)

Kate Bernheimer and Maria Tatar have organized a petition to request that the National Book Foundation allow mythological and fairy-tale retellings to be eligible for the National Book Award. I hadn't even realized they weren't, but I think it's silly, obviously — why cordon off a huge group of the narratives that influence all writers?

To add your support to the petition, email the organizers (contact info on the page above) or join the petition's Facebook page.

And speaking of mythological retellings, there's a Beckett-influenced play called "Penelope" currently onstage in Brooklyn. That review says it's "like a dream you might have after too much neat whiskey at a tacky marina bar in the company of bookish Irish sots." That's… just about the polar opposite to my style of mythological retelling, which is more an "every angel is terrifying" kind of thing. But it sounds like a remarkable way to dramatize the bizarreness of Penelope's long wait and the demise of the suitors.

Friday, and I'm very glad about it

A few more links! These are all related to women and writing. That's sort of how I roll, especially on a Friday afternoon.

My dissertation is about antagonism between literary women in the early eighteenth-century, so I was amused to read this piece by Jessa Crispin about searching for positive depictions of female friendship in recent novels, which includes charming email correspondence with her own best female friend.

Slightly related: this flowchart of reductive characterizations of women in fiction.

One blogger's thoughtful response to Lionel Trilling's essay on Mansfield Park (which you can and should find in this book, if you haven't read it — unsurprisingly, it's delightful).

Also, this is too lovely not to share.

I try not to use my blog as a tumblr, but this seems just Alcestis-appropriate enough to squeak by: historical fiction from a different era. (It's somewhat difficult to search for historical fictions about Amazons these days.) I don't know enough about the evolution of the Amazon myth to know when it got this prettified. No "man-slayers" here, just a little light domination. Still, if that prettifying involves Katharine Hepburn in greaves, I guess I'm all right with it.

Found at this tumblr, with the following caption:

Katharine Hepburn as Amazon warrior princess Antiope & Colin Keith-Johnston as Theseus in stage production of The Warrior's Husband (1932) (via corbis)

"Who is Katharine Hepburn? It took me a long time to create that creature."

Apparently there was a film version of The Warrior's Husband produced in 1933. It didn't star Hepburn.

Spirit

Did you wear purple today? I found myself looking around on campus for other people in purple shirts, and wondering if they'd worn them for Spirit Day or not. I hope they all did. I wish I actually owned rainbow gear, so I could've made my allegiance even clearer. I'm usually pretty skeptical of activism-lite color branding — I am really not interested in buying pink paraphernalia if I could be donating directly to cancer research funds — but I do believe in it as a way to show support. I hope a lot of kids across the country today saw people wearing purple and knew what it meant.

If you want to do more to help victims of anti-LGBTQ bullying, support the Trevor Project.

I'm having a pretty busy week, so I leave you with links:

A great interview at the Paris Review blog with Michael Cunningham. I find him so charming in interviews and am really looking forward to picking up By Nightfall. (Hat tip to Michael Fauver for linking the interview.)
Alexander Chee on teaching the graphic novel.
A very sensible piece about how many copies books usually sell.
A petition to tell Silsbee High School (in Texas — oh, Texas) that it's really not okay to kick a girl off the cheerleading squad when she refuses to cheer for her rapist individually by name. Based on the information in that article, the high school's action was supported by a truly bizarre court decision, which claims that cheerleaders are only "mouthpieces" for the school and cannot refuse to cheer. It's like a creepy sf novel.
And a palate cleanser: Scottish wildcats, and one British scientist getting very excited about them (check out the embedded videos).

'Alcestis' in the academy

Last Thursday I did my first author visit. My dissertation director is teaching Alcestis in one of his courses this fall, which has led to a lot of delightful things — seeing the book get linked to Robinson Crusoe and The Tempest on Amazon, first of all, when a number of his students bought them together. We did a Q&A and they had great, insightful questions. (Lance is an amazing teacher and they are obviously careful readers.) They'd read the novel just after reading the Odyssey — how's that for pressure? I didn't ask them how the two compared. But we did talk about books that inspired the novel, about what Admetus really feels when Alcestis stood up at the banquet table, why Hades reacts the way he does to Persephone's interest in Alcestis, and why Hermes has a tattered cloak. On that last question I had to resort to the frustrating artistic answer and admit that he just does.

It felt a little weird, honestly, to be in a literature classroom as a writer and a source of information about my writing. As a creative writing teacher, of course, I've talked about my writing, but in that case I'm usually talking with students as fellow writers. Normally when I'm in a classroom discussing books with students my role is not to impose my viewpoint, though of course I have topics I'd like address and readings that I consider more or less valid depending on the textual evidence. But this time I was there as Author, complete with Intentions. And I was definitely not dead (though I was a little migrainey).

Lance also tells me that some students in the class may be writing papers on the novel. It's probably my years of academic conditioning talking, but I find that ridiculously exciting, and also kind of reassuring. As delighted as I was to answer questions about what I was thinking while I wrote the book, I'm glad they'll be developing their own interpretations of it, too.