Thomas aside, what exactly constitutes a “Welsh spa“, anyway? Like, you rub yourself down with rocks and moss and dry off with a whole sheep and roll in the heath?;
We are having the yard redone outside my window right now, so I am going to make this quick and then flee from this room with hands over ears. I swear to god the whine of a chop saw (or at least one you yourself are not operating) has the potential to completely overhaul the torture industry.
What book ending disappointed you most? (I remember IT being like that back when I was a teen… like he reached page 800 and said, O shit, I gotta wrap this up);
Fascinating essay in Harper’s about the under/over-valuing of “the relevant” in relation to art in general, but also about the changing nature of the word itself. I imagine many people are asking these same questions and coming up with a wide variety of answers. It will take me a bit to digest, even though it’s written very accessibly.
I see the prominence of “relevance” as a term of assessment in our current critical language as part of a huge and necessary correction, an assertion that these and other supposedly marginal experiences are pertinent, as all human experience is pertinent, to the communal endeavor to make sense of ourselves that is the labor of art. What I find moving in the shared etymology of “relevant” and “relieve”—that fossil poem I began with—is the resonance between “to make stand out, to render prominent or distinct,” and “to give ease from pain or discomfort.” The struggle to assert the value of a broader range of voices in our literature has relieved an injury, the injury of invisibility. That struggle is ongoing: just a few years ago, in a graduate seminar at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, an author I continue to revere characterized my work as resembling “a sociological report on the practices of a subculture.” The fallacy of a certain idea of universality is to imagine that any human experience is unmarked by the accidents of geography, history, demographics—to believe that an account of a Congregationalist minister in rural Iowa, say, is somehow larger, more relevant to a shared human story, than an account of sex among gay men. The idea of universality, when used in this way, is nothing more than a maneuver whereby a privileged social position—which is often the position of straightness, whiteness, and maleness—secures its own default status, and therefore its immunity from self-awareness and critique.
Because these battles are still being fought, I hesitate to articulate the ways in which I think our use of the word “relevant” is distorting our appraisals of art. But I can’t help feeling that the current idea of “relevance” recapitulates some of the disturbing features of “universality,” in the way my literature professors once applied the term. For decades now, since that change in usage, we have not had to specify to whom or to what a particular relevance pertains. That omission has become a presumption, making the word a kind of unmarked term. But relevance is never really unmarked: we generally do mean relevant to or for something or someone; we are all, always, addressing constituencies. The danger of obscuring this fact is that, like a certain usage of “universal,” it is ultimately a term of exclusion. Anytime we praise the relevance of a particular novel, we are positing, at least implicitly, the irrelevance of other novels; and often enough we make this judgment explicit. We are tired, I sometimes hear my friends say, I sometimes hear myself say, of stories about straight, white, privileged men contemplating adultery; we are tired of stories about Americans abroad; we are tired of stories about middle-class malaise. We are tired.
Reading has been proven to aid depression, whether the affected person reads in their head, or whether someone reads aloud. Sufferers report feeling more optimistic after reading or being read to. Where a low level of intervention is the best option for a mental health patient, things like self-help books have a double benefit – the patient benefits from the advice in the book, but they also benefit from the reading itself. Giving someone suffering from a mental health problem, the joy of reading could genuinely save a life, and many patients offered self-help books would not be readers otherwise.
The human brain functions similarly to a muscle in that the more active your brain is, the better. This is especially true in older people, who are at risk of mental decline, memory loss, and Alzheimer’s, but the effects of reading will carry through your whole life. Getting a reading habit as a young adult (or even younger) can decrease your chances of Alzheimer’s later. Regular brain activity, like reading, puzzles, or strategy games can reduce the mental decline by 32%.
Hey, welcome back once again to the tiny little campfire of hope in the darkness of a long week. Warm yourself by the fire of your freedom, but just remember to clean up your trash on Monday morning before work.
Bitch as an interesting essay about the challenges, failures, and questionable authenticity behind some of the movements pushing for diversity in publishing. I’d be interested to hear opinions from various voices working in the Canadian industry.
Publishing has long been in a battle over diversity and inclusion, and after being caught in a moment of coalescing awareness of racism, companies are advertising vague “diversity and inclusion lead” jobs. There’s no indication that these roles will be given the support staff, resources, or institutional backing to carry out their duties, but that hasn’t stopped companies from proclaiming them the solution to corporate racism. Publishers are hastily pulling “problematic” books from store shelves, with no meaningful statements about how these books came to be in the first place. Publishers are still pressuring writers of color to stick to stereotypes or to turn their books into “special learning experiences.” Pay disparities are still vast, highlighted in author L.L. McKinney’s trending #PublishingPaidMe hashtag. The hunger for diverse content is exemplified by the book lists featuring marginalized authors that nearly every publication seems to be pursuing.
But the way we talk about representation and the call to produce books written by people who share their characters’ identities and lived experiences can be simplistic, and even dangerous. There’s increasing pressure for authors to divulge personal information, even if it endangers them or feels too intimate. This was on sharp display in September, when young adult author Becky Albertelli felt pushed to come out after being criticized for writing queer books as a seemingly straight woman. On the surface, wanting to read books written by people who share marginalized identities with their characters is a reasonable expectation, especially considering that marginalized people have been intentionally cut out of publishing for so long. White authors can write all the Black characters they like, for example, but Black authors have to fight for every inch of inclusion. Many Black authors have heard the common refrain that “we already have our Black story this season.”
Rumaan Alam, author of Leave the World Behind, is interviewed a the Paris Review and lays out some very reasonable boundaries on what he’s willing to tolerate when it comes to genre snobbery: not much. I feel the same way. As a kid, I spent many years reading garbage, but among the dross were studded moments of brilliance. For every dumbass Dragonlance novel I read, there was a McCaffrey; for every physics-fetishism Niven there was a Le Guin; for every schlocky Batman there was a The Watchmen. And when I stopped reading spec and fantasy, the author names changed, but the ratio of self-indulgent-trash/mediocre-phoned-in-prose to brilliant storytelling did not. Over the years I’ve been advised by several industry professionals and established writers to distance myself from genre and humour (back in 2009 or so, I was in fact told Bookninja was the reason my poems hadn’t been nominated for any national awards thus far: because no one could take that saucy doofus seriously… Or, you know, maybe they just didn’t sit right with the juries?), but I don’t have the stomach for it anymore. I just want to like the stuff I like, and I want to write the stuff I write. My poet’s mind is separate from my reader’s mind, though they do get together for coffee now and then. Get over it, haters!
It’s not a genre I read very much in my current life, but I certainly did when I was young. I read a lot of mysteries, a lot of thrillers—closer to horror than to science fiction. And it made a big impression on me. I really admire the genre. When well practiced, it’s an extremely efficient narrative tool. I guess that’s a dumb thing to say, because the same is true no matter what form you’re talking about. A sonnet or a short story can be incredibly efficient, too, of course. But I think there is a prevailing snobbery about writing horror or thriller, “genre fiction,” that it’s fundamentally less serious. I don’t think that’s true. Because, in the end, it’s really about building a very efficient machine in order to achieve a very specific goal. The author wants to make you quake. He wants to make you shiver. He wants to terrify you. Literary fiction is a genre all it’s own, with its own expectations and conventions, and the aim is less often to elicit that emotional response. It’s more often about doing something compelling on the level of language or style—it’s a different kind of endeavor. But I don’t think that means one is better than the other.
Bookninja 