I'm not really a big video gamer - I like to say that video games got too advanced for me around the era of the N64. Once they stopped doing side scrolling games? I was totally lost.
But my brother is a huge gamer, so despite hardly playing a game at all, I try to keep abreast of the latest gaming news, so after seeing this Slate interview with Jeff Ryan, I thought I'd give this book a try. My family was always a Nintendo family - my parents liked Nintendo's emphasis on family-friendly games - so I've always had an affinity for Super Mario.
Super Mario: How Nintendo Conquered America isn't a hard hitting expose. This is no tell-all memoir of tawdry details and sordid affairs. Ryan doesn't necessarily avoid some of the less-than-awesome things Nintendo has done, but he certainly prefers to emphasize the positives of the company.
And there's a lot of positives here. Did you know Nintendo was trying to get us all into online gaming way back in the NES (Nintendo Entertainment System) era? That the character of Mario was created in a company-wide contest (because the president of Nintendo didn't want to pull his "real" programmers away from other projects that were more-likely money makers. Mario, via Donkey Kong the arcade game, was a last-ditch effort to recoup losses in the US market)? That the NES Mario games were some of the first to be intentionally designed to make you want to replay them over and over to learn all their secrets?
While there's an extensive bibliography (according to the acknowledgements, there's even supposed to be "downloadable content" extra chapters at the website, but right now that appears to be only for those who preordered? Hm), this isn't a heavy academic tome with footnotes every two paragraphs. It's a serious look at a light-hearted topic, but isn't afraid to have fun, either. Video game puns abound, and the book design is whimsical - the book is divided in sections, further divided into chapters, so the chapter headings are given in familiar Mario-game parlance: 2-1, 4-8 and so on.
While the focus is definitely on Mario and Nintendo, this strikes me as a must-read for all gamers, because without Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft wouldn't be around as we know them. Nintendo was the front runner for so many years that they drove innovation in the industry. And while Nintendo has forfeited the graphics fight to the other two powerhouses, it's still driving innovation in the industry. Ryan calls the other two's attempts to get into motion-controlled gaming merely also-rans, and that Nintendo had considered those ideas first, but opted for a controller-based motion system because they felt using your whole body as a controller would require a player to basically re-learn controls for every game. If nothing else, Nintendo thinks their decisions through with painstaking detail.
This is an excellent adult non-fiction book that will appeal to anyone interested in video games. I highly enjoyed it.
Showing posts with label adult. Show all posts
Showing posts with label adult. Show all posts
Monday, September 19, 2011
Monday, April 11, 2011
Review: Clara and Mr. Tiffany by Susan Vreeland
My first introduction to Susan Vreeland was in high school when I read The Passion of Artemisia. At the time it was being considered for the BBYA list because of the teenage protagonist. It didn't end up making the list, but it was a powerful story - based on the life of Artemisia Gentileschi, a 17th century painter who often depicted strong women of the Bible and mythology. A haunting and captivating story. So when I heard that Vreeland had a new book, I knew I needed to get it - I didn't even look to see if it was based on a real person this time around and just dove in!
Like Artemisia, Clara Driscoll is an artist constricted by society's attitudes about what women can and should accomplish. Instead of paintings, however, Clara works in glass, and is responsible for creating some of the most famous designs for Louis Comfort Tiffany's innovative glass lamps.
While working for Tiffany is a dream come true in some ways, it's incredibly stifling in others. The unionized male glass workers don't appreciate the women's department, headed by Clara, getting some of the greatest commissions. And while Tiffany is rather forward thinking in hiring women at all, he has old fashioned notions about married women, namely that they shouldn't be working. Clara resigned from Tiffany's once before to get married, but returned upon the death of her husband. She longs to have a romantic companion in her life again, but is also loyal to Mr. Tiffany, and then there's the matter of her life's passion in being an artist. How is Clara supposed to choose?
There are also wonderful subplots and minor characters - Clara has several gay friends she interacts with throughout the story, growing quite close to some of them, but my favorite recurring subplot had to be Clara's burgeoning social consciousness and labor organizing. When the male glassworkers start grumbling about all the work the women are doing, Clara organizes all of the women to march to work in solidarity under the banner of labor rights and women's rights. She counsels many of the young women in her department to improve their skills so they can earn more money to support their families, and delay marriage as long as possible to be sure they can start their married lives with a bit of money of their own. She also gets a bicycle, which just makes me want to read Wheels of Change even more (NYPL, Queens Library: WHY DON'T YOU HAVE IT YET?!). I have a feeling Clara's bike rides really illustrate a lot of what that book is talking about.
Clara has some thoroughly modern attitudes, but they're tempered by some truly Victorian attitudes that keep her from coming across as too 21st century, such as buying into the "benevolent" stereotype that women are more attuned to color so it's okay that they are segregated in their own department in the glass factory. She's overall a great character because she has so many different interests, passions, and problems that she truly comes to life. The same can't be said for all of the side characters, as especially some of the men in the periphery of Clara's life are hard to distinguish from each other.
So was Clara Driscoll a real person? Absolutely - though no one knew it until 2006. Because I'm a huge geek I would have liked a longer author's note at the end about Vreeland's research. While she relates the discovery of Clara's letters that led to the re-evaluation of the design of Tiffany lamps, I wondered how much of the characterization of other historical characters were based on fact - especially Louis Comfort Tiffany himself. But hey, I suppose I can find a biography of him on my own and try to learn for myself what may have been fact and what was fiction in Vreeland's complex depiction.
Like Artemisia, Clara Driscoll is an artist constricted by society's attitudes about what women can and should accomplish. Instead of paintings, however, Clara works in glass, and is responsible for creating some of the most famous designs for Louis Comfort Tiffany's innovative glass lamps.While working for Tiffany is a dream come true in some ways, it's incredibly stifling in others. The unionized male glass workers don't appreciate the women's department, headed by Clara, getting some of the greatest commissions. And while Tiffany is rather forward thinking in hiring women at all, he has old fashioned notions about married women, namely that they shouldn't be working. Clara resigned from Tiffany's once before to get married, but returned upon the death of her husband. She longs to have a romantic companion in her life again, but is also loyal to Mr. Tiffany, and then there's the matter of her life's passion in being an artist. How is Clara supposed to choose?
There are also wonderful subplots and minor characters - Clara has several gay friends she interacts with throughout the story, growing quite close to some of them, but my favorite recurring subplot had to be Clara's burgeoning social consciousness and labor organizing. When the male glassworkers start grumbling about all the work the women are doing, Clara organizes all of the women to march to work in solidarity under the banner of labor rights and women's rights. She counsels many of the young women in her department to improve their skills so they can earn more money to support their families, and delay marriage as long as possible to be sure they can start their married lives with a bit of money of their own. She also gets a bicycle, which just makes me want to read Wheels of Change even more (NYPL, Queens Library: WHY DON'T YOU HAVE IT YET?!). I have a feeling Clara's bike rides really illustrate a lot of what that book is talking about.
Clara has some thoroughly modern attitudes, but they're tempered by some truly Victorian attitudes that keep her from coming across as too 21st century, such as buying into the "benevolent" stereotype that women are more attuned to color so it's okay that they are segregated in their own department in the glass factory. She's overall a great character because she has so many different interests, passions, and problems that she truly comes to life. The same can't be said for all of the side characters, as especially some of the men in the periphery of Clara's life are hard to distinguish from each other.
So was Clara Driscoll a real person? Absolutely - though no one knew it until 2006. Because I'm a huge geek I would have liked a longer author's note at the end about Vreeland's research. While she relates the discovery of Clara's letters that led to the re-evaluation of the design of Tiffany lamps, I wondered how much of the characterization of other historical characters were based on fact - especially Louis Comfort Tiffany himself. But hey, I suppose I can find a biography of him on my own and try to learn for myself what may have been fact and what was fiction in Vreeland's complex depiction.
Monday, January 3, 2011
Nonfiction Monday Review: The Girl in the Song by Michael Heatley
Found via: Chasing Ray
I'm not generally a big music person - I'm not the type that is constantly hooked up to an iPod or streaming Pandora. The music I do listen to, however, I like to know a lot about. The lyrics at a bare minimum. When VH1's Behind the Music debuted, I was totally fascinated because I wanted to know what inspired people to write the songs they did. The Girl in the Song fulfills that need for me, describing the women who inspired 50 rock songs, by artists ranging from Buddy Holly to David Bowie.
Heatley arranges the songs by title and methodically spends a couple of pages on each song, dedicating most of the text to a biography of the woman and/or how she inspired the artist, and then in a box at the end gives a short introduction to the band or artist (as necessary - eventually all of the Beatles and Rolling Stones pages are dedicated just to the woman, because there's only so much you can say about those legendary groups without becoming redundant).
Perhaps because the book is limited to "rock" songs, it sometimes feels a little redundant - as I said, there are a lot of Beatles and Rolling Stones references. Even David Bowie has multiple entries. I'm far from a music encyclopedia, but were there no other songs worthy of having their stories told?
That being said, I did like that variety that is included. Most of the songs are well known by now, and some of the background stories are well known, too, but others are more obscure. Leonard Cohen wrote Chelsea Hotel No 2 about Janis Joplin. "Fire and Rain" was written in part as a memorial to a dead friend. I was especially fascinated when the same person came up multiple times. English model/photographer Pattie Boyd inspired at least three songs by two different artists - husbands George Harrison and Eric Clapton, and the Farrow sisters Mia and Prudence both inspired famous songs.
I really appreciate that Heatley keeps most of the focus on the women who served as inspiration for the songs. The artist's side of the story has already been shared with millions of people - it's about time the woman's side was shared. Heatley highlights how the songs popularity affected the women, and their own career accomplishments.
This is a quick read, but extremely fun for pop culture and music trivia fans. While it's not specifically a YA title, I think it will have a lot of interest for young music fans, and could be a great companion read to a book like Audrey Wait, which is all about how life changes dramatically for a girl who inspires a major hit song.
I'm not generally a big music person - I'm not the type that is constantly hooked up to an iPod or streaming Pandora. The music I do listen to, however, I like to know a lot about. The lyrics at a bare minimum. When VH1's Behind the Music debuted, I was totally fascinated because I wanted to know what inspired people to write the songs they did. The Girl in the Song fulfills that need for me, describing the women who inspired 50 rock songs, by artists ranging from Buddy Holly to David Bowie.
Heatley arranges the songs by title and methodically spends a couple of pages on each song, dedicating most of the text to a biography of the woman and/or how she inspired the artist, and then in a box at the end gives a short introduction to the band or artist (as necessary - eventually all of the Beatles and Rolling Stones pages are dedicated just to the woman, because there's only so much you can say about those legendary groups without becoming redundant).Perhaps because the book is limited to "rock" songs, it sometimes feels a little redundant - as I said, there are a lot of Beatles and Rolling Stones references. Even David Bowie has multiple entries. I'm far from a music encyclopedia, but were there no other songs worthy of having their stories told?
That being said, I did like that variety that is included. Most of the songs are well known by now, and some of the background stories are well known, too, but others are more obscure. Leonard Cohen wrote Chelsea Hotel No 2 about Janis Joplin. "Fire and Rain" was written in part as a memorial to a dead friend. I was especially fascinated when the same person came up multiple times. English model/photographer Pattie Boyd inspired at least three songs by two different artists - husbands George Harrison and Eric Clapton, and the Farrow sisters Mia and Prudence both inspired famous songs.
I really appreciate that Heatley keeps most of the focus on the women who served as inspiration for the songs. The artist's side of the story has already been shared with millions of people - it's about time the woman's side was shared. Heatley highlights how the songs popularity affected the women, and their own career accomplishments.
This is a quick read, but extremely fun for pop culture and music trivia fans. While it's not specifically a YA title, I think it will have a lot of interest for young music fans, and could be a great companion read to a book like Audrey Wait, which is all about how life changes dramatically for a girl who inspires a major hit song.
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
Review: Dragon Chica by May Lee Chai
Found via: Forever Young Adult
This is definitely a novel with cross over appeal - I'm pretty sure technically it's written as an adult novel, just because of stylistic quirks that aren't part of the YA tradition, but since it covers Nea's young adulthood (we meet her when she's 11 and follow her through the end of high school), it's definitely accessible to teens as well. I could definitely see this being one of those mother/daughter book club picks.
It's the 1980s and Nea, her mother, older sisters, and three younger siblings, are scraping by in Texas. The only Khmer in the community - the only Asians, really - and not knowing if any of their relatives were also able to escape from the Khmer Rouge regime, Nea feels more isolated than the average 11 year old. So when an aunt and uncle write her mother, saying they now live in Nebraska and run a Chinese restaurant there, Nea's mother promptly packs up the family and their few belongings in their beat up car, and drive from Texas to Nebraska.
Nebraska is not the land of dreams as her aunt and uncle promised, however. While Chinese restaurants were prestigious in Cambodia, Nebraskans haven't developed a taste for Asian cuisine yet. The family spends long hours at the restaurant for little pay off, and eventually Nea's sister Sourdi is set up in an arranged marriage with a much older man who her uncle is in debt to. At 16, Sourdi is suddenly put into the role of a grown woman, and Nea loses the one person in the family she feels she can talk to. Nea spends the rest of her teen years feeling increasingly isolated and angry - at the hicks who shout racial slurs at her family, at the family the demands she works when she should be studying, and at the mother who doesn't understand her Americanized daughter.
While this novel covers ages and experiences that are often part of YA novels, it really brought into focus for me some of the stark contrasts between adult and YA. For one thing, YA novels don't usually last very long - I think covering the course of a single school year is the longest period of time I can think of off hand. More often the novel's events will happen in days or maybe weeks. Dragon Chica covers 7 years in under 300 pages. This isn't a criticism, as Chai does an excellent job of picking out the important events over those 7 years, but merely an observation of one of th major differences between YA and adult novels.
Nea's story is painful to read at times, as her family is the victim of some ugly racism. Her family also has some difficulty adjusting to their places in America - her younger siblings are too young to remember their time in Cambodia so they are excused from acting "American," while Sourdi is old enough that she has extensive memories of Cambodia and wishes in many ways to remain true to that heritage. Nea is truly a child of both worlds, with vague memories of Cambodia but an intense desire to fit in as much as possible with her American schoolmates. While parts of Nea's story are surely unique to the Cambodian immigrant experience, large parts of it also seem like they apply to all immigrants, and will be appreciated by anyone with close ties to another country and culture.
This is definitely a novel with cross over appeal - I'm pretty sure technically it's written as an adult novel, just because of stylistic quirks that aren't part of the YA tradition, but since it covers Nea's young adulthood (we meet her when she's 11 and follow her through the end of high school), it's definitely accessible to teens as well. I could definitely see this being one of those mother/daughter book club picks.
It's the 1980s and Nea, her mother, older sisters, and three younger siblings, are scraping by in Texas. The only Khmer in the community - the only Asians, really - and not knowing if any of their relatives were also able to escape from the Khmer Rouge regime, Nea feels more isolated than the average 11 year old. So when an aunt and uncle write her mother, saying they now live in Nebraska and run a Chinese restaurant there, Nea's mother promptly packs up the family and their few belongings in their beat up car, and drive from Texas to Nebraska.Nebraska is not the land of dreams as her aunt and uncle promised, however. While Chinese restaurants were prestigious in Cambodia, Nebraskans haven't developed a taste for Asian cuisine yet. The family spends long hours at the restaurant for little pay off, and eventually Nea's sister Sourdi is set up in an arranged marriage with a much older man who her uncle is in debt to. At 16, Sourdi is suddenly put into the role of a grown woman, and Nea loses the one person in the family she feels she can talk to. Nea spends the rest of her teen years feeling increasingly isolated and angry - at the hicks who shout racial slurs at her family, at the family the demands she works when she should be studying, and at the mother who doesn't understand her Americanized daughter.
While this novel covers ages and experiences that are often part of YA novels, it really brought into focus for me some of the stark contrasts between adult and YA. For one thing, YA novels don't usually last very long - I think covering the course of a single school year is the longest period of time I can think of off hand. More often the novel's events will happen in days or maybe weeks. Dragon Chica covers 7 years in under 300 pages. This isn't a criticism, as Chai does an excellent job of picking out the important events over those 7 years, but merely an observation of one of th major differences between YA and adult novels.
Nea's story is painful to read at times, as her family is the victim of some ugly racism. Her family also has some difficulty adjusting to their places in America - her younger siblings are too young to remember their time in Cambodia so they are excused from acting "American," while Sourdi is old enough that she has extensive memories of Cambodia and wishes in many ways to remain true to that heritage. Nea is truly a child of both worlds, with vague memories of Cambodia but an intense desire to fit in as much as possible with her American schoolmates. While parts of Nea's story are surely unique to the Cambodian immigrant experience, large parts of it also seem like they apply to all immigrants, and will be appreciated by anyone with close ties to another country and culture.
Friday, October 15, 2010
Sci Fi Friday Review: Feed by Mira Grant
Sometimes I debate what titles I should include in my Sci Fi Friday reviews. Should I expand it to Sci Fi/Fantasy? (No, because I generally dislike fantasy and don't want it interfering with my science-y goodness) What about horror? Or superhero graphic novels? While Feed falls firmly into the horror genre, what with all the zombies running around, there are also some awesome bits of science and tech, allowing me to make it a Sci Fi Friday contribution without hesitation.
It's been twenty years since the dead have risen. Mutated from the cures for humankind's greatest illnesses, the virus lies dormant in every human being, ready to reanimate the corpse to become one of the walking dead with the incessant need to feast on human flesh.
Which is a good thing because there's been a dearth of SF in my life lately
It's been twenty years since the dead have risen. Mutated from the cures for humankind's greatest illnesses, the virus lies dormant in every human being, ready to reanimate the corpse to become one of the walking dead with the incessant need to feast on human flesh.Siblings Georgia and Shaun, along with their friend Buffy, are mid-level bloggers ready to make it to the big time when they're selected to be part of the press team for presidential candidate Peter Ryman. Dedicated first and foremost to reporting the news, the bloggers unwittingly become part of the news when a series of suspicious zombie attacks start following Ryman. A cut fence here, an infected horse there, and it begins to become very obvious these aren't accidents - someone is using the zombie virus as a biological weapon.
Technically this is an adult novel, but I'm confident it will have plenty of teen crossover appeal. Georgie and Shaun are in their twenties (no definitive age is given that I saw), and they also still live at home, under the imposing shadows of their famous-blogger parents. There's been some talk over the past year about a potential new marketing category called "new adult" and I think Feed could easily be classified there.
Grant has included lots of funny details for readers to pick up on. While it's explained that Georgia was born at a time when the most popular girls' names were Georgia, Georgette and Barbra as George Romero was recognized as a sort of patron saint of the zombie apocalypse, it's up to zombie fans to guess where Shaun's name comes from - Shaun of the Dead anyone? (And for the uninitiated, Barbra was the woman in Night of the Living Dead) Bloggers have also organized themselves into a couple of factions - broadly the Newsies, the Fictionals and the Irwins, who like to go out in the field and poke zombies with sticks (they also give out an annual award called the Stevies, solidifying the tribute to the late, great Steve Irwin). Each faction has sub-factions - for example in the Newsies, the people who deliver the news with a healthy dose of opinion are called Stewarts. I loved these little glimpses into Grant's world building, and make it clear she probably has lots of details planned out for this trilogy.
As a blogger, and as someone who probably gets 90% of her news from various blogs (and the other 10% still from internet sources like the New York Times online or streaming Rachel Maddow's show), I absolutely loved following a group of citizen journalists on the campaign trail. Of the trio, Georgia and Buffy were definitely my favorites, but Shaun and Georgia have a great rapport as well.
While I loved the blending of genres in this book (new adult, zombie horror, journalistic thriller), and Grant has clearly done some great work with her world building, the overall setting just never worked for me. It's been twenty years since the zombies first rose, which really isn't much time at all, and there's already a fully functioning government? It felt like the zombies were never that much of a threat if the whole world didn't collapse, and now that the government is functioning so well the zombies are only terrifying on a personal level (like if you're like Shaun and enjoy poking zombies with sticks) and no longer on a widespread level. There are so many weapons and defense tactics and decontamination safety protocols in place, that society really isn't in danger of ever collapsing, which for me is half the fun of zombie stories. Humanity can try to rebuild, but it shouldn't be as good as it was before, unless a much longer period of time has passed.
I know this review is getting long but I have to praise Grant on one other thing - this has one of the best surprises I've ever read in a novel. If nothing else, strictly from a writing standpoint it's fascinating to see it done, and her technique for accomplishing it. It's a huge spoiler so I can't go into detail, but as a writer myself it was interesting to see an author do what I'd long thought was impossible.
Feed is the first book in a new trilogy, but there's no severe cliffhanger ending here and feels like a complete story in itself. I recommend picking this one up, though personally I don't know if I'll be back for more - the fully functional society really irritated me on some levels.
Sunday, July 18, 2010
Review: Enlightened Sexism by Susan J. Douglas
Found via: Amelia Bloomer Project nominee
I wanted to love this book so, so much. In high school I read Susan Faludi's Backlash for my AP American Lit class. After seeing the summer reading list was made up entirely of male authors, I asked if there were going to be women included in the actual class before I would agree to actually taking the class. The teacher assured me there would even be feminist literature as an option for our big mid-year report. When it was time to actually choose books for that report...they were all by men again. I basically asked the teacher what the hell, and she said I could read Backlash, warning me some of her positions might be "a little extreme." I ended up loving Backlash, even though it made my project much harder than it should have been (everyone else got to work in groups on fiction novels, so clearly there were some "separate but not-really equal" issues going on here), and when I saw Douglas cites Backlash often in her introduction, I was hoping this would be the early 21st century version of that book and, as it's nominated for the Amelia Bloomer list, some frustrated girl back in Holland might be assigned this more contemporary book instead.
Douglas' theory of enlightened sexism holds that it "is a response, deliberate or not, to the perceived threat of a new gender regime. It insists that women have made plenty of progress because of feminism - indeed, full equality has allegedly been achieved - so now it's okay, even amusing to resurrect sexist stereotypes of girls and women" (9). It "is more nuanced and much more insidious than out-and-out backlash. As Susan Faludi 
amply demonstrated, backlash involves a direct, explicit refutation of feminism as misguided and bad for women. Enlightened sexism is subtler" (11). All well and good so far.
Douglas then goes on to painstakingly dissect what has happened in popular culture since Backlash was first published in 1991, focusing primarily on magazines and television programming, with a little bit of music critique thrown in (she wasn't happy when her daughter was a Spice Girls fan in the 90s, uncomfortable with the group's attempt to pass off their sexuality as a girl power/feminist message). Xena and Buffy are upheld as feminist TV standards. The original 90210 and Melrose Place, which aired at roughly the same time, were an anti-feminist wasteland when it came to portrayals of women, but feminism had clearly influenced the men as they were softer and more affectionate than previous generations of TV men. Shows like Murphy Brown were a grey area, showing a powerful woman successful in her career, but also bringing with it a lot of embedded feminism, as Murphy's achievements were presented simply as "part of the cultural landscape" and it was never mentioned how much she would have had to struggle to achieve such a position in the real world (9). Then Ally McBeal and reality TV came along and this was the beginning of the end.
Magazines for women and men are also skewered, women's magazines for their contradictory advice ("love your body!" on one page and "New miracle diet!" on the next) and male-gaze-centric advice (ever notice how all of those lurid headlines for better sex are about improving his pleasure?), men's magazines (primarily Maxim) for their soft-core porn views of women. She also focuses a lot on the celebrity tabloid culture that has arisen, including how even CNN was focused for days on the non-story of Anna Nicole Smith's death.
I have to admit, I found all of this interesting, but I also had a healthy feeling of "this is nothing new." I don't want to put another nail in publishing's coffin, but I wonder if books like Douglas' are going to be on their way out soon, because almost every topic has already been covered by blogs - and they've even taken some of her reporting farther. In the last chapter Douglas looks at motherhood and how stories of women "opting out" of the workforce have been greatly exaggerated, and the new books and blogs that rising showing women truly struggling with motherhood, not even trying to keep up the veneer of "having it all," and being celebrated for it. Well, that last bit sounds an awful lot like the bad mommy genre that was the talk of the blogs in May 2009 (Enlightened Sexism was published in March 2010). While the book gives a name to a lot of subjects I've thought about before (I particularly liked embedded feminism), for anyone who's been following the conversations on the major feminist blogs, all of this is old news. It's nice having everything in one location, but in the age of blogs, are books like this redundant?
But redundant or not, the most damning part of Douglas' book is...her tone. Okay, I totally cringe to use that word in a discussion of a feminist work, but I'm not sure what else fits here. Basically, Douglas sets up a lot of her arguments as an "us vs. them" battle - and I'm not talking men vs. women. No, for Douglas the "us" is older women (or "vintage females" as she bizarrely refers to herself throughout the text) and the "them" is every one younger who is implicitly held responsible for the popularity of tacky magazines and preposterous reality TV shows. In her conclusion, Douglas presents two possible scenarios of the future, one where a feminist grandmother is surrounded by ridiculous things like potty-training thongs for her granddaughter, who she's caring for while her daughter tries to figure out how to handle going back to work after 6 weeks unpaid maternity leave, and another future in which the feminist grandmother is part of a movement where all older women have risen up and renewed the consciousness-raising strategies of the 70s to revolutionize American culture. In both cases, women of my generation (mid-twenties), are left out of the solution.
I felt similarly about Flow when I reviewed it two weeks ago - how are these books getting nominated for the Amelia Bloomer list? Both are definitely feminist books, so they fit the list's first criteria, but I can't imagine any young woman willingly reading either of these and feeling like she was represented. Both books focus on the experiences and attitudes of women who are at least a decade past their teen years, and the Amelia Bloomer list's charge is to find feminist titles for young readers ranging from birth to 18. There's nothing here keeping a high schooler from reading Enlightened Sexism, and I think the average high schooler could learn a lot, but first she would have to get past Douglas' apparent bias against young women, and that just might be too tall of an order.
I wanted to love this book so, so much. In high school I read Susan Faludi's Backlash for my AP American Lit class. After seeing the summer reading list was made up entirely of male authors, I asked if there were going to be women included in the actual class before I would agree to actually taking the class. The teacher assured me there would even be feminist literature as an option for our big mid-year report. When it was time to actually choose books for that report...they were all by men again. I basically asked the teacher what the hell, and she said I could read Backlash, warning me some of her positions might be "a little extreme." I ended up loving Backlash, even though it made my project much harder than it should have been (everyone else got to work in groups on fiction novels, so clearly there were some "separate but not-really equal" issues going on here), and when I saw Douglas cites Backlash often in her introduction, I was hoping this would be the early 21st century version of that book and, as it's nominated for the Amelia Bloomer list, some frustrated girl back in Holland might be assigned this more contemporary book instead.Douglas' theory of enlightened sexism holds that it "is a response, deliberate or not, to the perceived threat of a new gender regime. It insists that women have made plenty of progress because of feminism - indeed, full equality has allegedly been achieved - so now it's okay, even amusing to resurrect sexist stereotypes of girls and women" (9). It "is more nuanced and much more insidious than out-and-out backlash. As Susan Faludi amply demonstrated, backlash involves a direct, explicit refutation of feminism as misguided and bad for women. Enlightened sexism is subtler" (11). All well and good so far.Douglas then goes on to painstakingly dissect what has happened in popular culture since Backlash was first published in 1991, focusing primarily on magazines and television programming, with a little bit of music critique thrown in (she wasn't happy when her daughter was a Spice Girls fan in the 90s, uncomfortable with the group's attempt to pass off their sexuality as a girl power/feminist message). Xena and Buffy are upheld as feminist TV standards. The original 90210 and Melrose Place, which aired at roughly the same time, were an anti-feminist wasteland when it came to portrayals of women, but feminism had clearly influenced the men as they were softer and more affectionate than previous generations of TV men. Shows like Murphy Brown were a grey area, showing a powerful woman successful in her career, but also bringing with it a lot of embedded feminism, as Murphy's achievements were presented simply as "part of the cultural landscape" and it was never mentioned how much she would have had to struggle to achieve such a position in the real world (9). Then Ally McBeal and reality TV came along and this was the beginning of the end.
Magazines for women and men are also skewered, women's magazines for their contradictory advice ("love your body!" on one page and "New miracle diet!" on the next) and male-gaze-centric advice (ever notice how all of those lurid headlines for better sex are about improving his pleasure?), men's magazines (primarily Maxim) for their soft-core porn views of women. She also focuses a lot on the celebrity tabloid culture that has arisen, including how even CNN was focused for days on the non-story of Anna Nicole Smith's death.
I have to admit, I found all of this interesting, but I also had a healthy feeling of "this is nothing new." I don't want to put another nail in publishing's coffin, but I wonder if books like Douglas' are going to be on their way out soon, because almost every topic has already been covered by blogs - and they've even taken some of her reporting farther. In the last chapter Douglas looks at motherhood and how stories of women "opting out" of the workforce have been greatly exaggerated, and the new books and blogs that rising showing women truly struggling with motherhood, not even trying to keep up the veneer of "having it all," and being celebrated for it. Well, that last bit sounds an awful lot like the bad mommy genre that was the talk of the blogs in May 2009 (Enlightened Sexism was published in March 2010). While the book gives a name to a lot of subjects I've thought about before (I particularly liked embedded feminism), for anyone who's been following the conversations on the major feminist blogs, all of this is old news. It's nice having everything in one location, but in the age of blogs, are books like this redundant?
But redundant or not, the most damning part of Douglas' book is...her tone. Okay, I totally cringe to use that word in a discussion of a feminist work, but I'm not sure what else fits here. Basically, Douglas sets up a lot of her arguments as an "us vs. them" battle - and I'm not talking men vs. women. No, for Douglas the "us" is older women (or "vintage females" as she bizarrely refers to herself throughout the text) and the "them" is every one younger who is implicitly held responsible for the popularity of tacky magazines and preposterous reality TV shows. In her conclusion, Douglas presents two possible scenarios of the future, one where a feminist grandmother is surrounded by ridiculous things like potty-training thongs for her granddaughter, who she's caring for while her daughter tries to figure out how to handle going back to work after 6 weeks unpaid maternity leave, and another future in which the feminist grandmother is part of a movement where all older women have risen up and renewed the consciousness-raising strategies of the 70s to revolutionize American culture. In both cases, women of my generation (mid-twenties), are left out of the solution.
I felt similarly about Flow when I reviewed it two weeks ago - how are these books getting nominated for the Amelia Bloomer list? Both are definitely feminist books, so they fit the list's first criteria, but I can't imagine any young woman willingly reading either of these and feeling like she was represented. Both books focus on the experiences and attitudes of women who are at least a decade past their teen years, and the Amelia Bloomer list's charge is to find feminist titles for young readers ranging from birth to 18. There's nothing here keeping a high schooler from reading Enlightened Sexism, and I think the average high schooler could learn a lot, but first she would have to get past Douglas' apparent bias against young women, and that just might be too tall of an order.
Monday, July 5, 2010
Nonfiction Monday Review: Flow: A Cultural History of Menstruation by Elissa Stein and Susan Kim
Found via: Campus Progress
I debated whether I should review this on the blog. On the one hand, it's a fascinating book and considering 
most women experience menstruation during their lifetimes, it's got broad appeal. On the other hand, it's not aimed at teenagers - or really even young adult women, specifically, especially if you consider the quotations from "real women" sprinkled throughout the text (the youngest woman was in her 30s). However, reading the book inspired some thoughts on YA for me and, well, it's pretty obvious by now I've decided to run with a review!
Flow: A Cultural History of Menstruation is pretty much exactly what it says in the title. Focusing on US culture, primarily in the 20th century, Stein and Kim explore how women's periods have been treated by the media, the medical establishment, and the enormous "feminine hygiene" industry.
Why the focus on the 20th century? Well, because prior to then we don't really know much about how women handled their periods. History is primarily written by men, who focus on major societal events. The first hand accounts we do have from women (usually in the forms of letters or diaries) don't really discuss menstruation, since it has historically been seen as something shameful and dirty and not fit for public discourse. In the 20th century, periods took awhile to become part of public life, but the first feminine hygiene advertisements began to appear (and some of them are hilariously vague, looking more like fashion photography than anything about periods!). Earlier this year, Kotex started a new ad campaign highlighting the ridiculousness of contemporary pad and tampon advertisements - but really, not a lot has changed in the 100 years or so since such advertisements first appeared!
(Disclosure: I'm totally a cynic about advertising but Kotex's plot totally worked on me. Of course, I might have switched brands anyway 'cause the black boxes really do stand out in the "feminine hygiene" aisle's sea of pastels)
Despite being an ostensibly adult, academic book, the book is accessible to younger and non-academic types. Citations are given in text, by which I mean instead of endless footnotes to check up on where a fact comes from, Stein and Kim incorporate the origin of a quotation in the text and an extensive bibliography at the end so you can find everything yourself, if you're so inclined.
I was disappointed that when testimonies about women's actual experiences with their periods were included, it was entirely from older women. Okay, 30s isn't exactly "old," but it's older than I am, and gave a very narrow view point. I think it would have been more educational for audiences of all ages if a wider variety of women were excerpted in the text.
Aside from menstruation, there are also brief forays into the history of how women's health has been treated, as many conditions in women were ascribed to our uteruses (uteri?) and menstrual cycles. Often, women were just written off as being "hysterical" - and all sorts of fun treatments were derived from that, from hysterectomies (not fun) to "pelvic massage" (probably slightly more fun - link to Wikipedia contains mildly NSFW images).
Stein and Kim's primary goal here is to demystify our periods, since so many women still talk about them in whispers and euphemisms, when they're discussed at all. This is where I think this could be especially useful to teen readers, because I know while I haven't been afraid to discuss my period since high school, I was probably in the minority.
And this is also how I got thinking about periods in YA lit. Actually, I think of it periodically (ha, see what I did there?), but this book helped crystallize some of my thoughts. Primarily, does anyone else think it's weird how rarely periods are mentioned in YA lit? There's the infamous Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, and the menstrual cycles of Fire's eponymous heroine actually had an influence on the plot. Nina de Gramont's Every Little Thing in the World (review upcoming. Spoiler alert: I loved it!) mentions periods, as the protagonist is on a month long wilderness trip so of course most of the teen girls are going to end up having a period at some point or other. But off the top of my head, those are the only ones I could think of. Occasionally a teen girl will fake cramps to get out of doing something, but otherwise you rarely see periods mentioned. Considering periods are a huge part of the lives of teenage girls (I don't think I angsted about anything more in middle school), it seems like a suspicious absence. If you know of any other titles, please leave them in the comments!
Today's Nonfiction Monday is hosted by 5 Great Books!
I debated whether I should review this on the blog. On the one hand, it's a fascinating book and considering most women experience menstruation during their lifetimes, it's got broad appeal. On the other hand, it's not aimed at teenagers - or really even young adult women, specifically, especially if you consider the quotations from "real women" sprinkled throughout the text (the youngest woman was in her 30s). However, reading the book inspired some thoughts on YA for me and, well, it's pretty obvious by now I've decided to run with a review!Flow: A Cultural History of Menstruation is pretty much exactly what it says in the title. Focusing on US culture, primarily in the 20th century, Stein and Kim explore how women's periods have been treated by the media, the medical establishment, and the enormous "feminine hygiene" industry.
Why the focus on the 20th century? Well, because prior to then we don't really know much about how women handled their periods. History is primarily written by men, who focus on major societal events. The first hand accounts we do have from women (usually in the forms of letters or diaries) don't really discuss menstruation, since it has historically been seen as something shameful and dirty and not fit for public discourse. In the 20th century, periods took awhile to become part of public life, but the first feminine hygiene advertisements began to appear (and some of them are hilariously vague, looking more like fashion photography than anything about periods!). Earlier this year, Kotex started a new ad campaign highlighting the ridiculousness of contemporary pad and tampon advertisements - but really, not a lot has changed in the 100 years or so since such advertisements first appeared!
(Disclosure: I'm totally a cynic about advertising but Kotex's plot totally worked on me. Of course, I might have switched brands anyway 'cause the black boxes really do stand out in the "feminine hygiene" aisle's sea of pastels)
Despite being an ostensibly adult, academic book, the book is accessible to younger and non-academic types. Citations are given in text, by which I mean instead of endless footnotes to check up on where a fact comes from, Stein and Kim incorporate the origin of a quotation in the text and an extensive bibliography at the end so you can find everything yourself, if you're so inclined.
I was disappointed that when testimonies about women's actual experiences with their periods were included, it was entirely from older women. Okay, 30s isn't exactly "old," but it's older than I am, and gave a very narrow view point. I think it would have been more educational for audiences of all ages if a wider variety of women were excerpted in the text.
Aside from menstruation, there are also brief forays into the history of how women's health has been treated, as many conditions in women were ascribed to our uteruses (uteri?) and menstrual cycles. Often, women were just written off as being "hysterical" - and all sorts of fun treatments were derived from that, from hysterectomies (not fun) to "pelvic massage" (probably slightly more fun - link to Wikipedia contains mildly NSFW images).
Stein and Kim's primary goal here is to demystify our periods, since so many women still talk about them in whispers and euphemisms, when they're discussed at all. This is where I think this could be especially useful to teen readers, because I know while I haven't been afraid to discuss my period since high school, I was probably in the minority.
And this is also how I got thinking about periods in YA lit. Actually, I think of it periodically (ha, see what I did there?), but this book helped crystallize some of my thoughts. Primarily, does anyone else think it's weird how rarely periods are mentioned in YA lit? There's the infamous Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, and the menstrual cycles of Fire's eponymous heroine actually had an influence on the plot. Nina de Gramont's Every Little Thing in the World (review upcoming. Spoiler alert: I loved it!) mentions periods, as the protagonist is on a month long wilderness trip so of course most of the teen girls are going to end up having a period at some point or other. But off the top of my head, those are the only ones I could think of. Occasionally a teen girl will fake cramps to get out of doing something, but otherwise you rarely see periods mentioned. Considering periods are a huge part of the lives of teenage girls (I don't think I angsted about anything more in middle school), it seems like a suspicious absence. If you know of any other titles, please leave them in the comments!
Today's Nonfiction Monday is hosted by 5 Great Books!
Friday, February 12, 2010
Review: Spotlight by John Granger (Part 2)
I spent Wednesday's snowpocalypse laying in bed trying to get rid of my cold and reading up on criticism of Spotlight. I really felt like I was back in college! I majored in Language, Literature and Writing, and spent as much of my time as possible critiquing popular works (I took a whole class in Harry Potter, took a film & literature course where my final paper was on the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, and my senior thesis was on the Uglies series, just to name a few). I've considered getting my master's in comparative media studies so I can be like Henry Jenkins, or even John Granger, and make my living writing all academically about "silly" things.
All of that is simply meant to explain that I'm a huge dork and while I'm still not a Twilight fan (oops, spoiler alert for that eventual review!), I had a very geeky sort of fun going through this.
I'm going to first give my critique of the book and then, thanks to Jettboy's comment on my previous post, I'll include some of the online critiques of Granger's writing and my responses to those critiques.
Spotlight is divided into two halves: Part One is titled Taking Bella Seriously: Reading Twilight as Literature and Part Two is Twilight as an LDS Midsummer Night's Dream: Reading as Dream Interpretation. The first half uses a Jungian psychological theory to break down the text, focusing on why it appeals to so many readers, while the second half looks at the Mormon imagery in the text and how Meyer's religion may have influenced her.
Granger's chosen method of literary criticism is iconological criticism - I can't provide a link to further explanation of the subject because Granger seems to have coined that particular phrase. He links it back to Northrop Frye, but so far I haven't been able to find any non-Granger works that link the two. This is a habit of Granger's, apparently, because in order to delve into the fourth level of iconological criticism, the anagogical level that I said in my last post totally lost me originally, involves understanding literary alchemy. I eventually had to go to Facebook to ask my fellow lit major friends (some of whom have gone on to get their Masters in the subject) if they had ever heard of literary alchemy as an established theory. Again, Googling the term and related ones only brought me back to other pieces of Granger's work; he doesn't explain where this theory is grounded in Spotlight - he simply says he's discussed this more at length in his Harry Potter books. Eventually our collective research led us to the Wikipedia article on alchemy which explained the Jung connection. Granger simply asks us to "[p]retend as if you accept [literary alchemy] as gospel truth that English Literature from beginning to Twilight is frontloaded with alchemical devices and images" (113). Man, I wish I'd been able to get away with telling my college professors (or my speech judges!) that my model was correct and they just needed to go with it!
So while a lot of Granger's analysis seems to have merit on the surface, we are forced to simply accept his words as truth (unless we want to hunt down the original texts he cites - however I have a huge stack of non-academic books I want to read, so I'm going to take the easy way out and pass on that one).
As I said in the Spotlight event recap, iconological criticism has four levels: surface, moral, allegorical and anagogical. The first two levels are pretty self-explanatory: on the surface we have a love story with some action thrown in at the end of each book and the moral (from Granger's perspective) is the great post-modern moral of rejecting the dominant cultural narratives and embrace those who are discriminated against. We root for the underdog, in this case the misunderstood Cullens who just want to live in peace, against the Powers That Be, the Volturi and other human-eating vampires.
The next two levels, allegorical and anagogical, require a little more legwork. The primary allegory is the entire saga re-casting the story of the Garden of Eden. Edward represents God and Bella the human who wants to know him. There are additional allegories, such as the Cullen family as a positive allegory for Mormons, a zombie allegory in New Moon, and all of the vampires that appear at the end of Breaking Dawn are supposed to be allegories for religious and other groups that are seen as sympathetic towards Mormons (except for the Amazon feminists...even Granger acknowledges there's a gap there. I'll have more on that and other gaps later), but primarily we're looking at a Medieval-style morality play about the Fall of Man (and thus it's fitting that we use iconological criticism, which has its roots in how stories were interpreted in Medieval times. At least according to Granger). Why are these allegories so important? Because "the reason we and millions of other readers around the world respond to these stories is that their allegorical and anagogical meanings are about the central drama and relationship of human existence - our life with God - told in compelling, engaging fashion" (76).
And here's where I need to pause and give my first critique of Granger. I know he's a religious man and part of his interest in literary criticism is about representations of faith in texts, but I find it to be quite presumptuous that he believes all Twihards are searching for an engaging story about God. If that were true, the only Twilight-haters would be die hard atheists. Granger makes several similar comments throughout the book that clearly imply his own biases, which puts me off a lot. I find reading about religion fascinating, but that doesn't make me a believer of any particular one I'm reading about.
Okay, now that that first bit is out of the way, we can try to tackle this anagogical layer.
Granger never provides a cut-and-dried definition of what he means here. He says "the anagogical or sublime meaning of a text is that layer of artistry, almost always beneath our conscious experience on first and even after multiple readings, that corresponds with, stimulates, and fosters our spiritual orientation and transformation" (10). If we understand the surface level of a story as information or data, the anagogical layer is spiritual knowledge or wisdom (17). He also compares it to finally getting a proof in geometry, but since I don't think I ever did a proof correctly, that comparison is lost on me, too (100). Dictionary.Com tells me it means of or pertaining to anagoge, which is "a spiritual interpretation or application of words, as of Scriptures." And this is where he begins to pull in the literary alchemy, using ancient ideas of alchemy to break down a story into three stages: a black period of dissolution or darkness, a white period of purification, and finally the red period of "spiritual accomplishment or perfection" (115). In Harry Potter, the last three books are respectively the black, white and red periods of Harry's story. For Twilight, the black period begins with New Moon (which coincidentally stars Jacob Black), then Eclipse and Breaking Dawn are the white and red stages. Granger acknowledges that, at least while writing New Moon, Meyer probably didn't recognize she was writing an alchemical story, but she has said she based New Moon on Romeo and Juliet and Breaking Dawn was based on both A Midsummer Night's Dream and Merchant of Venice, "all Shakespeare alchemical dramas" and thus by the time she was starting Breaking Dawn surely she had to recognize what she was doing (120).
There's more alchemy stuff, but I need to stop right here for another critique. Granger claims the alchemical drama is a staple of English literature - and I'm not really going to argue with him there. However in his talk last week Granger mentioned that he was sure Meyer was aware of all of this alchemy stuff because she studied English at Brigham Young University. I'm not going to say Eastern Michigan University is as illustrious a school as BYU, but I can tell you right now that studying "English" is not necessarily comparable to studying "English literature." In comparisons with Harry Potter, JK Rowling has said in interviews that she studied alchemy to figure out how she wanted her magic to work (though nowhere that I've seen did she say she studied alchemical literary theory - it's a bit of a jump in my mind to go from "what did alchemists try to do" to "how can alchemy work as a metaphor for a story's structure"), plus her stories actually qualify as being English literature since she's British and all. So if alchemy is a great English literary tradition it probably rubbed off on her in some respect, research or no. Stephenie Meyer, however, could easily have gone through an American degree program in English without spending much time at all on great works of English literature (I certainly structured my degree that way!). So without more evidence, I'm calling shenanigans on any of this alchemy stuff actually being intentional on any level. That includes the black/white/red covers - Meyer apparently was unprecedentedly involved in designing the cover of Twilight, but didn't have as much influence on later ones (as per her New Moon FAQ) - which is when she would have figured out this alchemy stuff according to Granger. Most likely the covers are all black/white/red because the first one was and, as I learned on Saturday, in a series art directors like to go for some sense of visual continuity. Striking still lifes in a limited color palette would seem to do the trick if you ask me.
With the main part of his literary criticism out of the way, I have only one more note on the subject, which comes from the lists of 10 included at the end of the book (shamelessly riffing on the top ten lists at the end of the "Dummies" books). In the list of "Ten Things the Critics Got Wrong About Twilight," Granger includes:
First of all, I found the continual use of "Mrs." and "Mr." throughout the book rather annoying - I get annoyed reading the New York Times, too - but that's just me. What really kind of irked me here is his dig at other types of literary criticism. While Granger is correct that those types of criticism aren't intended to delve into why a book is necessarily popular, I take exception to "Is that why you read? Me neither." Why isn't the point of these other criticisms - but how we engage with a text is. And quite frankly, Twilight does pander to some awful sexist stereotypes - there's no escaping that (more spoilers for my review!) I don't think the books are popular because of those tropes, but I find it extremely disconcerting that so many people can overlook them.
All of that is just the summary of the first half of the book. This is thick, academic-style stuff. Now for the religious half:
The second half has three major chapters, examining the series as the work of a Mormon artist, a Mormon apologist, and a Mormon apostate - or how her faith influenced the novels, what parts stand out as wish fulfillment style arguments against criticisms of her faith, and then where she actively criticizes her faith. This is where people tend to get up in arms about Granger's work.
From what I can tell, Granger did indeed do a great amount of research - there's an extensive bibliography at the end of the book. Some of what he read was written by Mormons, and some wasn't. What was written by Mormons he says had a pasteurized quality, following the principle of "progressive truth" where Mormon missionaries are to speak about the "more conventional elements of the faith" before more difficult tenets (155). This means that in a lot of online critiques, Granger is accused of harboring anti-Mormon sentiments because he is citing the works of non-Mormons (who may or may not have held an anti-Mormon grudge - I haven't done further research into these authors and while Granger certainly didn't sound anti-Mormon in his talk that doesn't mean his analysis is perfect or free from anti-Mormon bias given his research sources).
It is also in this section that some of those "gaps" I mentioned earlier come into more prominence. For example, the three Cullen couples are supposed to represent the Holy Trinity, or the mind, the body and the spirit in a slightly more secular sense. But then there's Edward who is God and/or Jesus (God when Bella is seeking religion, but Jesus in the sense that she can only seek salvation (being a vampire) through him). Of course, God and Jesus are usually part of the trinity, and Granger acknowledges this...but doesn't really resolve it. There's a similar gap when we come to Bella's transformation into a vampire and Renesmee's presence. Renesmee is the child of a god and a human and "saviour" who has "brought peace between the Quileutes and Cullens and revealed the Volturi for the evil they are" - yet it is Bella who has undergone a baptism by blood and a three day resurrection process and actively saves lives in that final confrontation (145). So who the hell is the Messianic figure - Edward, Bella or Renesmee? There's never a resolution.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this post (it seems so long ago!), Jettboy linked me to criticism of Granger's work written by an actual Mormon. So far I haven't been able to find any criticism of Spotlight itself; Jettboy's link critiques one of Granger's blog posts, and another post critiques an article Granger published in the November/December 2009 edition of Touchstone, a Christian journal. So some of the specifics of both of those blog posts become a little outdated when it comes to reading the full book (for example: Tyler Chadwick in the first article wishes that Granger had read Saturday's Werewolf, which is in fact cited at length in Spotlight)
The biggest problem these self-identified Mormon's seem to have with Granger's work is it comes across as anti-Mormon to them. I have a whole bunch of notes where I try to rebut their criticisms in order to "prove" Granger isn't anti-Mormon, but about halfway through I realized that I am totally the wrong person to be making that argument - just like I as a white woman don't get to correct a black person about issues of racism and I don't appreciate men telling me something isn't actually sexist, as a non-Mormon myself I can't really say what is actually anti-Mormon. So there's little I can engage with on that level - except to say that I think calling Granger an anti-Mormon is needlessly combative, just like calling someone a racist or a sexist doesn't solve those arguments, either - it's much more productive to call out the specific offensive action or word.
However, some of what they call out as anti-Mormon I had problems with as well, though for a different reason. Granger has clearly done some extensive research into Mormon history - even if some of that history was written by people with less-than-positive views of the religion. However, some of these ideas (the Mountain Meadows Massacre inspiring a dream about a meadow, Mormonism actually having roots back in 17th century England where Carlisle just happens to live before becoming a vampire) are so esoteric that I question whether someone would know them without doing extensive research. Especially if these ideas are considered anti-Mormon by the faithful, would Stephenie Meyer, a devout Mormon but by no means a fanatic or a scholar, really have come across them? Would they have stuck with her enough to form such important parts of her story? That's where my skepticism really comes in.
So what's my final verdict on Spotlight? It definitely raises some interesting questions, and provides some objective history of the writing process of the books (for example, Meyer says that the inspiration for her vampires comes more from Marvel superheroes than from vampire mythology. In some ways that makes them much more palatable to me!). If you're a geek like I am an enjoy applying scholarly thinking to popular works, you'll definitely get some enjoyment out of this - provided you can look past the fact that you've probably never before heard of any of the tools Granger uses. I'm still not a Twilight fan, but I'm definitely thinking about the books in a new light now.
The next post in this series will finally address my review of Twilight!
Previous post in this series:
All of that is simply meant to explain that I'm a huge dork and while I'm still not a Twilight fan (oops, spoiler alert for that eventual review!), I had a very geeky sort of fun going through this.
I'm going to first give my critique of the book and then, thanks to Jettboy's comment on my previous post, I'll include some of the online critiques of Granger's writing and my responses to those critiques.
Spotlight is divided into two halves: Part One is titled Taking Bella Seriously: Reading Twilight as Literature and Part Two is Twilight as an LDS Midsummer Night's Dream: Reading as Dream Interpretation. The first half uses a Jungian psychological theory to break down the text, focusing on why it appeals to so many readers, while the second half looks at the Mormon imagery in the text and how Meyer's religion may have influenced her.
Granger's chosen method of literary criticism is iconological criticism - I can't provide a link to further explanation of the subject because Granger seems to have coined that particular phrase. He links it back to Northrop Frye, but so far I haven't been able to find any non-Granger works that link the two. This is a habit of Granger's, apparently, because in order to delve into the fourth level of iconological criticism, the anagogical level that I said in my last post totally lost me originally, involves understanding literary alchemy. I eventually had to go to Facebook to ask my fellow lit major friends (some of whom have gone on to get their Masters in the subject) if they had ever heard of literary alchemy as an established theory. Again, Googling the term and related ones only brought me back to other pieces of Granger's work; he doesn't explain where this theory is grounded in Spotlight - he simply says he's discussed this more at length in his Harry Potter books. Eventually our collective research led us to the Wikipedia article on alchemy which explained the Jung connection. Granger simply asks us to "[p]retend as if you accept [literary alchemy] as gospel truth that English Literature from beginning to Twilight is frontloaded with alchemical devices and images" (113). Man, I wish I'd been able to get away with telling my college professors (or my speech judges!) that my model was correct and they just needed to go with it!
So while a lot of Granger's analysis seems to have merit on the surface, we are forced to simply accept his words as truth (unless we want to hunt down the original texts he cites - however I have a huge stack of non-academic books I want to read, so I'm going to take the easy way out and pass on that one).
As I said in the Spotlight event recap, iconological criticism has four levels: surface, moral, allegorical and anagogical. The first two levels are pretty self-explanatory: on the surface we have a love story with some action thrown in at the end of each book and the moral (from Granger's perspective) is the great post-modern moral of rejecting the dominant cultural narratives and embrace those who are discriminated against. We root for the underdog, in this case the misunderstood Cullens who just want to live in peace, against the Powers That Be, the Volturi and other human-eating vampires.
The next two levels, allegorical and anagogical, require a little more legwork. The primary allegory is the entire saga re-casting the story of the Garden of Eden. Edward represents God and Bella the human who wants to know him. There are additional allegories, such as the Cullen family as a positive allegory for Mormons, a zombie allegory in New Moon, and all of the vampires that appear at the end of Breaking Dawn are supposed to be allegories for religious and other groups that are seen as sympathetic towards Mormons (except for the Amazon feminists...even Granger acknowledges there's a gap there. I'll have more on that and other gaps later), but primarily we're looking at a Medieval-style morality play about the Fall of Man (and thus it's fitting that we use iconological criticism, which has its roots in how stories were interpreted in Medieval times. At least according to Granger). Why are these allegories so important? Because "the reason we and millions of other readers around the world respond to these stories is that their allegorical and anagogical meanings are about the central drama and relationship of human existence - our life with God - told in compelling, engaging fashion" (76).
And here's where I need to pause and give my first critique of Granger. I know he's a religious man and part of his interest in literary criticism is about representations of faith in texts, but I find it to be quite presumptuous that he believes all Twihards are searching for an engaging story about God. If that were true, the only Twilight-haters would be die hard atheists. Granger makes several similar comments throughout the book that clearly imply his own biases, which puts me off a lot. I find reading about religion fascinating, but that doesn't make me a believer of any particular one I'm reading about.
Okay, now that that first bit is out of the way, we can try to tackle this anagogical layer.
Granger never provides a cut-and-dried definition of what he means here. He says "the anagogical or sublime meaning of a text is that layer of artistry, almost always beneath our conscious experience on first and even after multiple readings, that corresponds with, stimulates, and fosters our spiritual orientation and transformation" (10). If we understand the surface level of a story as information or data, the anagogical layer is spiritual knowledge or wisdom (17). He also compares it to finally getting a proof in geometry, but since I don't think I ever did a proof correctly, that comparison is lost on me, too (100). Dictionary.Com tells me it means of or pertaining to anagoge, which is "a spiritual interpretation or application of words, as of Scriptures." And this is where he begins to pull in the literary alchemy, using ancient ideas of alchemy to break down a story into three stages: a black period of dissolution or darkness, a white period of purification, and finally the red period of "spiritual accomplishment or perfection" (115). In Harry Potter, the last three books are respectively the black, white and red periods of Harry's story. For Twilight, the black period begins with New Moon (which coincidentally stars Jacob Black), then Eclipse and Breaking Dawn are the white and red stages. Granger acknowledges that, at least while writing New Moon, Meyer probably didn't recognize she was writing an alchemical story, but she has said she based New Moon on Romeo and Juliet and Breaking Dawn was based on both A Midsummer Night's Dream and Merchant of Venice, "all Shakespeare alchemical dramas" and thus by the time she was starting Breaking Dawn surely she had to recognize what she was doing (120).
There's more alchemy stuff, but I need to stop right here for another critique. Granger claims the alchemical drama is a staple of English literature - and I'm not really going to argue with him there. However in his talk last week Granger mentioned that he was sure Meyer was aware of all of this alchemy stuff because she studied English at Brigham Young University. I'm not going to say Eastern Michigan University is as illustrious a school as BYU, but I can tell you right now that studying "English" is not necessarily comparable to studying "English literature." In comparisons with Harry Potter, JK Rowling has said in interviews that she studied alchemy to figure out how she wanted her magic to work (though nowhere that I've seen did she say she studied alchemical literary theory - it's a bit of a jump in my mind to go from "what did alchemists try to do" to "how can alchemy work as a metaphor for a story's structure"), plus her stories actually qualify as being English literature since she's British and all. So if alchemy is a great English literary tradition it probably rubbed off on her in some respect, research or no. Stephenie Meyer, however, could easily have gone through an American degree program in English without spending much time at all on great works of English literature (I certainly structured my degree that way!). So without more evidence, I'm calling shenanigans on any of this alchemy stuff actually being intentional on any level. That includes the black/white/red covers - Meyer apparently was unprecedentedly involved in designing the cover of Twilight, but didn't have as much influence on later ones (as per her New Moon FAQ) - which is when she would have figured out this alchemy stuff according to Granger. Most likely the covers are all black/white/red because the first one was and, as I learned on Saturday, in a series art directors like to go for some sense of visual continuity. Striking still lifes in a limited color palette would seem to do the trick if you ask me.
With the main part of his literary criticism out of the way, I have only one more note on the subject, which comes from the lists of 10 included at the end of the book (shamelessly riffing on the top ten lists at the end of the "Dummies" books). In the list of "Ten Things the Critics Got Wrong About Twilight," Granger includes:
Reading Mrs. Meyer's books as transparencies not of historical or supernatural referents but of sociological or economic meaning (via Marxist, feminist, and deconstructive exegesis) is to skip over why the books appeal to readers. Worse, it explains why they are popular because of readers' politically incorrect or immature understanding, even their sexist, racist and class driven beliefs. This neglects Eliade's thesis in favor of a bizarre, alternate understanding of why people read, say, that the herd reads in order to confirm their moral, political, and social misconceptions. Is that why you read? Me neither (242).
First of all, I found the continual use of "Mrs." and "Mr." throughout the book rather annoying - I get annoyed reading the New York Times, too - but that's just me. What really kind of irked me here is his dig at other types of literary criticism. While Granger is correct that those types of criticism aren't intended to delve into why a book is necessarily popular, I take exception to "Is that why you read? Me neither." Why isn't the point of these other criticisms - but how we engage with a text is. And quite frankly, Twilight does pander to some awful sexist stereotypes - there's no escaping that (more spoilers for my review!) I don't think the books are popular because of those tropes, but I find it extremely disconcerting that so many people can overlook them.
All of that is just the summary of the first half of the book. This is thick, academic-style stuff. Now for the religious half:
The second half has three major chapters, examining the series as the work of a Mormon artist, a Mormon apologist, and a Mormon apostate - or how her faith influenced the novels, what parts stand out as wish fulfillment style arguments against criticisms of her faith, and then where she actively criticizes her faith. This is where people tend to get up in arms about Granger's work.
From what I can tell, Granger did indeed do a great amount of research - there's an extensive bibliography at the end of the book. Some of what he read was written by Mormons, and some wasn't. What was written by Mormons he says had a pasteurized quality, following the principle of "progressive truth" where Mormon missionaries are to speak about the "more conventional elements of the faith" before more difficult tenets (155). This means that in a lot of online critiques, Granger is accused of harboring anti-Mormon sentiments because he is citing the works of non-Mormons (who may or may not have held an anti-Mormon grudge - I haven't done further research into these authors and while Granger certainly didn't sound anti-Mormon in his talk that doesn't mean his analysis is perfect or free from anti-Mormon bias given his research sources).
It is also in this section that some of those "gaps" I mentioned earlier come into more prominence. For example, the three Cullen couples are supposed to represent the Holy Trinity, or the mind, the body and the spirit in a slightly more secular sense. But then there's Edward who is God and/or Jesus (God when Bella is seeking religion, but Jesus in the sense that she can only seek salvation (being a vampire) through him). Of course, God and Jesus are usually part of the trinity, and Granger acknowledges this...but doesn't really resolve it. There's a similar gap when we come to Bella's transformation into a vampire and Renesmee's presence. Renesmee is the child of a god and a human and "saviour" who has "brought peace between the Quileutes and Cullens and revealed the Volturi for the evil they are" - yet it is Bella who has undergone a baptism by blood and a three day resurrection process and actively saves lives in that final confrontation (145). So who the hell is the Messianic figure - Edward, Bella or Renesmee? There's never a resolution.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this post (it seems so long ago!), Jettboy linked me to criticism of Granger's work written by an actual Mormon. So far I haven't been able to find any criticism of Spotlight itself; Jettboy's link critiques one of Granger's blog posts, and another post critiques an article Granger published in the November/December 2009 edition of Touchstone, a Christian journal. So some of the specifics of both of those blog posts become a little outdated when it comes to reading the full book (for example: Tyler Chadwick in the first article wishes that Granger had read Saturday's Werewolf, which is in fact cited at length in Spotlight)
The biggest problem these self-identified Mormon's seem to have with Granger's work is it comes across as anti-Mormon to them. I have a whole bunch of notes where I try to rebut their criticisms in order to "prove" Granger isn't anti-Mormon, but about halfway through I realized that I am totally the wrong person to be making that argument - just like I as a white woman don't get to correct a black person about issues of racism and I don't appreciate men telling me something isn't actually sexist, as a non-Mormon myself I can't really say what is actually anti-Mormon. So there's little I can engage with on that level - except to say that I think calling Granger an anti-Mormon is needlessly combative, just like calling someone a racist or a sexist doesn't solve those arguments, either - it's much more productive to call out the specific offensive action or word.
However, some of what they call out as anti-Mormon I had problems with as well, though for a different reason. Granger has clearly done some extensive research into Mormon history - even if some of that history was written by people with less-than-positive views of the religion. However, some of these ideas (the Mountain Meadows Massacre inspiring a dream about a meadow, Mormonism actually having roots back in 17th century England where Carlisle just happens to live before becoming a vampire) are so esoteric that I question whether someone would know them without doing extensive research. Especially if these ideas are considered anti-Mormon by the faithful, would Stephenie Meyer, a devout Mormon but by no means a fanatic or a scholar, really have come across them? Would they have stuck with her enough to form such important parts of her story? That's where my skepticism really comes in.
So what's my final verdict on Spotlight? It definitely raises some interesting questions, and provides some objective history of the writing process of the books (for example, Meyer says that the inspiration for her vampires comes more from Marvel superheroes than from vampire mythology. In some ways that makes them much more palatable to me!). If you're a geek like I am an enjoy applying scholarly thinking to popular works, you'll definitely get some enjoyment out of this - provided you can look past the fact that you've probably never before heard of any of the tools Granger uses. I'm still not a Twilight fan, but I'm definitely thinking about the books in a new light now.
The next post in this series will finally address my review of Twilight!
Previous post in this series:
Monday, January 18, 2010
Review: When Everything Changed by Gail Collins
I loved Collins' previous book, America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines. It's a great look at all sorts of women who helped form America. Collins has a great narrative style: the big changes are illustrated through the stories of individuals. When Everything Changed picks up where America's Women left off - covering the last half of the 20th century, and is quite current, as not only are Hillary Clinton's and Sarah Palin's historic campaigns covered, but also the signing of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act at the beginning of President Obama's term.
For covering a much shorter period of time, When Everything Changed is a much longer book, exhaustively covering a dizzying variety of women's lives. In some ways, the society Collins describes at the outset of the book feels like an alien world - women were chastised in traffic court for wearing slacks and married women couldn't be in control of family finances. Women were fired for getting married or having children and patronizing limits on how long a woman could work crippled women's abilities to provide for their families.
I'll admit, I knew a lot of those stories. But it's one thing to know that our country used to be so outwardly sexist, and another to read the first hand accounts of women who suffered under such indignities.
In light of today being a celebration of Dr. Martin Luther King's work, I also want to highlight that there is an extended section on the civil rights movement, and the great efforts women put in to ensure equality not just for their race, but for their gender as well. Some of our country's best known equal rights activists have been men, but Collins highlights how that was, at least in part, because the women in the movement were still expected to be subservient, just as women throughout America were expected to be subservient to men in general. However despite the lack of public recognition, women insisted on being part of the civil rights process at every turn, from planning rallies to participating in sit-ins that always carried the risk of violent attacks, helping to create the model that future generations of civil rights activists would follow.
Also important to note today: over the weekend it popped up on the blogosphere that Bloomsbury, the publisher that infamously whitewashed the cover of Liar, has done it again with Magic Under Glass. I wrote about it in the early hours of yesterday, and Ari at Reading in Color is collecting links related to this latest incident of racefail. Please check it out and think about what you can do to encourage publishers to accurately portray their characters of color on their covers.
For covering a much shorter period of time, When Everything Changed is a much longer book, exhaustively covering a dizzying variety of women's lives. In some ways, the society Collins describes at the outset of the book feels like an alien world - women were chastised in traffic court for wearing slacks and married women couldn't be in control of family finances. Women were fired for getting married or having children and patronizing limits on how long a woman could work crippled women's abilities to provide for their families.
I'll admit, I knew a lot of those stories. But it's one thing to know that our country used to be so outwardly sexist, and another to read the first hand accounts of women who suffered under such indignities.
In light of today being a celebration of Dr. Martin Luther King's work, I also want to highlight that there is an extended section on the civil rights movement, and the great efforts women put in to ensure equality not just for their race, but for their gender as well. Some of our country's best known equal rights activists have been men, but Collins highlights how that was, at least in part, because the women in the movement were still expected to be subservient, just as women throughout America were expected to be subservient to men in general. However despite the lack of public recognition, women insisted on being part of the civil rights process at every turn, from planning rallies to participating in sit-ins that always carried the risk of violent attacks, helping to create the model that future generations of civil rights activists would follow.
Also important to note today: over the weekend it popped up on the blogosphere that Bloomsbury, the publisher that infamously whitewashed the cover of Liar, has done it again with Magic Under Glass. I wrote about it in the early hours of yesterday, and Ari at Reading in Color is collecting links related to this latest incident of racefail. Please check it out and think about what you can do to encourage publishers to accurately portray their characters of color on their covers.
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Review: Turning Japanese by Cathy Yardley
Found via: Galley Cat
Here's one of those rare moments where I step outside of my comfort zone and read something "age appropriate" - a book for grown ups!
But don't get too excited - I bet this would have a lot of appeal for older high school students as well, especially those who love manga and Japanese culture.
Lisa wins the chance of a life time after entering a manga contest at San Francisco's Comic Convention (does anyone actually call it that? I'm pretty sure it's just Comic Con these days): she's going to be an intern for a year in Tokyo with a manga publisher. At first Lisa is hesitant - she hates to travel and has a comfortable life in upstate New York with an overachieving boyfriend and the friends she's had since high school. But they all gang up on her (in a mostly loving way) and convince her to make the journey to Japan.
Lisa is half-Japanese, but has rarely ventured outside of her small town in New York, and finds herself more than a bit lost in Japan's culture. Intellectually she knows it's a very polite culture where individualism is discouraged in some ways, but it's a whole different ball game actually living there! She has to deal with a crazy host family, a demanding boss, and an internship that is nothing like what she thought it was going to be.
Sometimes Lisa's lack of a backbone and the other characters' contributions to this got on my nerves - I really wanted to yell at her sometimes that she wasn't being the jerk, her boyfriend was (oh man I couldn't stand that guy). But her time in Japan made for some fascinating reading - I bet teen readers would love Lisa's host family, which consists of two overburdened parents, a twenty-something woman who parties all night and sleeps all day, and a 12 year old boy who has everyone else so under his thumb that he does nothing but play video games. Literally - he doesn't even go to school just because he doesn't want to!
I also really enjoyed that, unlike a lot of other "chick lit" that I've read, finding "the one" wasn't the point of the book. Yes there is the aforementioned jerk boyfriend, but since he's literally on the other side of the world Lisa finds lots of other things to occupy her time. It ends up being a great story about a young woman taking risks and finding out who she is and what makes her happiest.
Here's one of those rare moments where I step outside of my comfort zone and read something "age appropriate" - a book for grown ups!
But don't get too excited - I bet this would have a lot of appeal for older high school students as well, especially those who love manga and Japanese culture.
Lisa wins the chance of a life time after entering a manga contest at San Francisco's Comic Convention (does anyone actually call it that? I'm pretty sure it's just Comic Con these days): she's going to be an intern for a year in Tokyo with a manga publisher. At first Lisa is hesitant - she hates to travel and has a comfortable life in upstate New York with an overachieving boyfriend and the friends she's had since high school. But they all gang up on her (in a mostly loving way) and convince her to make the journey to Japan.
Lisa is half-Japanese, but has rarely ventured outside of her small town in New York, and finds herself more than a bit lost in Japan's culture. Intellectually she knows it's a very polite culture where individualism is discouraged in some ways, but it's a whole different ball game actually living there! She has to deal with a crazy host family, a demanding boss, and an internship that is nothing like what she thought it was going to be.
Sometimes Lisa's lack of a backbone and the other characters' contributions to this got on my nerves - I really wanted to yell at her sometimes that she wasn't being the jerk, her boyfriend was (oh man I couldn't stand that guy). But her time in Japan made for some fascinating reading - I bet teen readers would love Lisa's host family, which consists of two overburdened parents, a twenty-something woman who parties all night and sleeps all day, and a 12 year old boy who has everyone else so under his thumb that he does nothing but play video games. Literally - he doesn't even go to school just because he doesn't want to!
I also really enjoyed that, unlike a lot of other "chick lit" that I've read, finding "the one" wasn't the point of the book. Yes there is the aforementioned jerk boyfriend, but since he's literally on the other side of the world Lisa finds lots of other things to occupy her time. It ends up being a great story about a young woman taking risks and finding out who she is and what makes her happiest.
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