Sometimes I only open my mouth to switch feet

So.

In a moment of foolish honesty, I commented over at Dear Author in response to one of the perennial discussions about heroines’ sexuality and how they represent or do not represent women and whether this is accurate or not, etc. etc. Conservative mores, patriarchal value systems, virginity, nature/nurture, yadda, yadda, yadda. You know the drill, right? I refuse to summarize because I assume you’ve heard it before, not because it isn’t relevant.

In any case, I was moved by perhaps a brief epileptic seizure or Satan . . . I’m not sure which . . . to make the following comment, which I copy and paste here:

Lists, lists, and more lists: a memoir of a reader

I believe I started making list of books I wished to read when I was in high school. To illustrate the ginormity of my inner geekiness, I suspect I was the only 16 year old who skipped school to go to the library in order to look up books about books.  From these tomes, I accumulated volumes of paper, all of which are lined with my elegant-yet-totally-unreadable handwriting, all of which list books I wished to read.  Most of these earlier lists are in a file, in a box, in my parents’ garage. I shall probably take them with me when I move out of state again because God Forbid I should give up my lists.

In any case, what do these lists consist of? Well, they are books, sometimes songs, with title and author.  Why I wrote them down and from where, I do not know.  Only past Lazaraspaste can answer that question.  But here are some of them in a folder I found when cleaning out my paperwork during the holiday break.  My goal is to consolidate them, but I don’t know how I will do this. I think I need an iPhone because I would like one centrally located, ever accessible list so that when I am standing in the airport bookstore or the Barnes and Noble or the used bookstore, I will be able to call up my grand and teetering list and figure out what to buy.  Not, if my 500+ books listed on LibraryThing is any indication, that I don’t have enough books already but clearly I have a problem.

I know many of you have Kindles or Sonys and while I would like an ereader, I’m not a fan of the fact that the formats are so rigid. I would like to have the option of buying ebooks from anywhere and having the format be easily transferred to my ereader. Also, I can’t afford it. If I get an iPhone, I can’t get an ereader and I think I would use the iPhone more. If any of you out there have any opinion on this, please share with me.

I enjoy list making. Although, as a consummate and perpetual list-maker, I find certain kinds of lists disgraceful. For example, The Top 100 Books of the Century or the Year’s Best.  Well, not really. I mean, its very arbitrary, list-making is and any you make is going to have problems, even for you. You’ll invariably forget something important. This is how To Do lists and grocery lists work as well.  The best lists are ones that admit to their randomness and then explain what the book is about and why they’ve included it. My personal favorite of this sort is anything by Michael Dirda.  Michael Dirda works for the Washington Post and has very broad tastes.   I have discerned this from reading Classics for Pleasure, a book that jumps around genres quite liberally. Something I appreciate as a romance reader.

One of the chief reasons I became a librarian was my love of list making (I also like indices but let’s not go there). What is a library catalog if not a gigantic list? What are the shelves if not the physical manifestation of that list? Libraries, in recent years, have become less about books and more about other shit. Like community education and technology, and while that’s all fine and good, we still need books. I’m not one of those people who thinks that books will disappear because the thing about a book is that aside from the ability to read, you only need sunlight to operate one.  This is very handy.  I do not trust technology because technology breaks. It does. It does all the time. Things don’t download. You lose everything if you don’t back up. Things are scattered and hither and yon and you have to recollect them whenever you transfer to a new device. I’ve lost songs going from one computer to another, even with Geek Squad shifting everything over. I do not like the idea of losing my collections. I realize I’m a rarity but then while I think they’re are many readers out there, there are even less people who are literate and even fewer book lovers. Yes, I am a terrible snob, thank you. I think a book is a piece of art.  Its like owning a painting. I also have this theory that literacy, not just the ability to read but the ability to read for more than one meaning,  works out to about the same percentage that its always been. I know people who don’t read the same book more than once. This I find very shocking. I mean, how are you to know the book if you don’t read it more than once? How can you possibly pick up nuance, say?

In any case, I’m looking for better ways to make lists.  If I can incorporate technology into my listmaking, that would be great. We’ll see.

Chapter Up

There’s a chapter up at my other blog The Vulgar Fictions. Enjoy!

The Message of a Book: A Short Rant

This post was inspired by a discussion over at All About Romance a few months ago.

Can we just never talk about the message the book is giving to children ever again? Please. Pretty please. Or, you know what? Hey, let’s at least have like a two month moratorium on this discussion every year. We’ll call it “Let’s NOT Think About the Children Month”.  It’ll be great. We can discuss books without talking about how they affect readers.  No, the word is “effect” because apparently there’s this belief still circulating around that somehow art will cause you to do things. For instance, if you watch “The Last Temptation of Christ” one too many times you will become an atheist. Or if you read about romance novel alpha, bad boys somehow you will then go out and find yourself an abusive relationship. Can we just please admit that this is just not true? That art does not cause things? Except boredom on occasion.

Or maybe that it’s the opposite parallel.  Maybe girls read books with bad boys in them because that’s who they are attracted to already. Ever thought of that? And I’ve said this before but “bad boy” is a loose and ambiguous term.  I have a love for literary bad boys at the very least and yet, I find myself in stark disagreement with certain people about who they refer to as a “bad boy.”  Not only does the term change definition from person to person but one can also be attracted to some bad boys but not all bad boys.  Just because I fancied Lestat doesn’t mean I’m going to date Ted Bundy.  This whole conversation and line of thinking is so chock full of bad reasoning that I can barely keep from running around and smacking people upside the head.  Do you know what is a stronger factor in determining whether or not a young girl ends up in an abusive relationship or destructive sexual patterns? Shockingly (and Freudianly?) it is her relationship with her father, especially during her teen years when she feels like crap all the time and the other teens around her are basically no different from a pack of feral dogs.

Don’t you think that perhaps Bella’s attraction to the paternalistic, controlling Edward in Twilight was more a product of the distant and cold relationship she had with her father? He never talked to her. He barely checked in with her on how she was doing or why she would make the sudden decision not live with her mother and stepfather (I heard somewhere that Stephanie Meyer’s early version had her running to Forks because her stepdad had made an inappropriate pass at her)? Oh no, it could never be the dysfunctional family relationship. No, no.  Bella’s questionable attraction to Edward is clearly a direct result of her love of Wuthering Heights.

It just doesn’t scan. Moreover, plenty of people fall in love with the wrong people, especially when they are young. Rarely does it happen that one meets a life partner in the hormone addled days of their youth. It happens, but not often. Why? Because when you are a teenager you are technically a sociopath.  And everyone knows sociopaths have difficulty make good life choices.

Spinsters, Bluestockings, and Other Aging Virgins

I think I might be a spinster. Is there a checklist or something I can look at to make sure? Let’s see: over-educated, check. Glasses, check. Governess, oh no but teacher and librarian sort of equals that, terrible fashion sense, nope. Phew, this close to being a spinster.

But if I am a spinster and my life was a romance novel, then any day now Mr. Wonderful Pants should be coming along to sweep me off my feet. Which would be good because my love of beautiful shoes has completely ruined my feet. The bone below my big toe actually aches. However, I think that my shoes are the major fashion item preventing me from being a spinster.

In any case, I prefer romances featuring spinsters and bluestockings the most.  It has to do with Disney’s Sleeping Beauty.

When I was between three and five I was obsessed with several things: Mr. Darcy, The Nutcracker, The Magic Flute and being a Sleeping Beauty princess.  My love of Mr. Darcy was born of having viewed the old Masterpiece Theater version of Pride and Prejudice.  I thought Mr. Darcy was a dreamboat. According to my mother, I used to pretend to kiss Mr. Darcy.  I also wanted to be a ballet dancing, opera singer. Unfortunately, I was unable to carry either a  tune or a rhythm. Such is life.  I was also the oldest child of a family of girls.

By the time I was five I was very aware of the fact that eldest sisters rarely, if ever, get a happy ending. In order to get a happy ending one must the youngest or the only child. I was neither.  I was convinced that somehow this dream of being a ballet dancing, opera singing princess in a story would some day come to pass. After all, if sudden transformations into great beauties have taught us anything then they have taught us that sudden transformations into great beauties are possible.

Imagine my bitter disappointment when none of this actually occurred. Ah well, what can you do. The other aspect of myself that characterized my childhood was deep sensitivity to anything that stank remotely of injustice or unfairness. That being said, it always seemed to me to be extremely unjust that ugly step-sisters and eldest children got the shit end of the deal in fairy tales. I mean, why should birth order rule you out of having a happy ending?

Which brings me back to spinsters, bluestockings and other aging virgins. Here then is coterie of ugly step-sisters and eldest daughters, albeit not in those terms, who are finally getting their happy endings. This coterie also includes any girls with glasses.

Favorites of this genre include, but are not limited to:

Mary Challoner in The Devil’s Cub

Annelise Kempton in The Devil’s Waltz

Beth Armitage in An Unwilling Bride

Penelope Featherington in Romancing Mr. Bridgerton

And most especially, Sophie Hatter in Howl’s Moving Castle which is not a romance but amazing, amazing, amazing.

What I think I like most about these stories is that these heroines are not the object of initial desire, but somehow by being their own self, they become beloved.  While standards of beauty have changed, the one that has remained the same is that if a woman is to be successful in love then she must never be herself.  This is the central thesis of the infamous The Rules but it is not a new thesis.

Yet, these stories reject the notion that in order to be loved or sexually desired that a woman must hid her intelligence, push her beauty like a drug or crumble in the face of danger. In short, to exhibit masculine qualities rather than feminine virtues.  It’s rather heartening, but is it true? This I do not know.

Epilogues or Babies + Schmoop = Puke

Personally, I like children and someday I hope to have one or two.  However, children are not romantic. They are very opposite of romantic. As my father is wont to say, children are the enemy of gracious dining.  I think this could be extended to most activities.

And yet, children populate the epilogues and indeed, the logues of romance novels. Why is this? The heteronormative imperative to procreate? Mmmmmm, maybe but I think not so much.  I think it may be a genre standard which is to say that the romance genre is in a certain respect the opposite of tragedy in two ways:

1. It postulates a worldview in which the ultimate reality is happiness not grief and

2. It reifies the domestic. Epic and tragedy deal with Great Matters, matters of state, matters of God, and while romance does this, too, it does it on a more mundane level.

Thus the proliferation of babies is a symbolic measure of both of these standards. First, babies represent the continuity of generations as birth is the opposite of death. Second, babies represent the joy of the domestic. I say joy and not pleasure or happiness because children bring all of these things but when they are throwing a tantrum in the shoe department of the Nordstroms one rarely feels pleasure. Joy connotes a certain spike of pain along with the happiness, at least in my mind.

Despite this symbolic measure of babies, they aren’t romantic. Babies cry and shit and throw tantrums. They do not care if you are tired or hungry or horny. They rarely if ever negotiate. Oh sure, the baby is funny and adorable and says awesome things that you only wish you could still say, but that doesn’t take away the fact that the baby got some sort of sticky goop all over the couch . . . which you sat in. Not romantic.

So when novels end with the hero and heroine smooching over the sleeping head of a toddler all I can think to myself is, yeah right! One party would be off trying to do the following: laundry, the dishes, take a shower, sleep or watch something other than Caillou or Handy Manny.  

“Quick Henry!” the heroine ought to say in low panicked tones. “While Charles is asleep, I’m going to take a shower.”

“I’ll move him to the crib.”

“No, don’t do that. You’ll wake him up. Just let him sleep right there.”

“I need to vacuum up these cheerios. If I leave him here, he’ll wake up at the sound.”

“So don’t vacuum.”

“But I can’t vacuum when he’s awake, because he yanks the cord.”

“Ssshhhhhh, you’re gonna wake him up.”

“Can’t I do anything in this house?”

Well, at least that’s the way it goes in my family.  My point is that children don’t necessarily strengthen a relationship or offer convenient moments for making out.  I would like to see less babies and births in epilogues. I like the concept of an epilogue but maybe authors could just jog it down the road a few years to the vow renewal or a toast a child’s wedding. That would be better than babies.

Books I’ve Bought: A Photo Essay

I love library book sales. I love used bookstores. I love thrift stores. Why? Cheap paperback books. I used to scour the thrift shops of the East Village for hidden romance treasures, certain in the knowledge that they knew not what they had. And indeed, they didn’t. The following proves it.

I bought this in a bookshop located in the upstairs of an old 18th century building in St.Ives, Cornwall, UK.  I can’t remember how much I bought it for but I was stoked by the fact that at that time none of Heyer’s books were in print in the United States.

Fatty Fat Fat Fat

Over at All About Romance  Abi Bishop has written a post on fat heroes and heroines in romance.

Fat and love. Love and fat. The question, as far as fat in romance is concerned is this: Will the reader find a fat hero/heroine believable as a romantic lead? Or does being fat preclude having an erotic experience because fat is somehow a signifier for that total lack of sexual attractiveness? A recent survey (conducted by me, just minutes ago) of internet porn has concluded that there are a lot of fat, ugly, and fat n’ ugly people fucking a lot, in various positions all for the titallating enjoyment of viewers across the world. That said, if fat people can fuck in amateur porn and get a lot of viewers, why is it so unbelieve that fat people can fall in love and fuck both other fat people and thin people. Another survey, also conducted by me via observation of couples over the years and repeated viewings of the old TLC show A Wedding Story, has suggested that people pair off in the strangest manner. I postulate three kinds of pairngs off:

Misc. Notes

On Monday I start my graduate work, both the classes that I teach (how to write to freshmen) and the classes I am taking (three plus a colloquium). As such, I will be wonderfully overwhelmed. I am already overwhelmed.  Thus, I will be updating this blog more infrequently than I already do. I will be frequently infrequent.

Moreover, I’m beginning to wonder whether this blog is worth it or not. I’m not sure I’m saying anything different about romance that the twelve hundred other blogs on romance aren’t already saying and saying better. I wondering if I should even bother continuing with it with my work load the way it is going to be.

This is a long way of saying that you should probably not expect too many updates in the future.

Today’s Music Is . . .

Here is a sampling of several songs I find particularly delicious. Enjoy!

“The Rake’s Song” by The Decemberists

“True Romance” by She Wants Revenge

And last but not least:

“Wicked Game” by HIM