Pop fiction: To understand the resentment that underscores the criticism of Stephen King's recent award from the National Book foundation, you have to have to understand that entire purpose of literary fiction is to create a mutual admiration society where authors who nobody wants to read can get together and compliment each other and remind each other how wonderful they are, so that they don't have to focus on the fact that the majority of what they write is completely inaccessible to most.

They want it to be inaccessible. They want it to be over people's heads. Because otherwise, what could they tell themselves when it wasn't salable?

So they lie to themselves and say that popular fiction is hack work that could be slapped together by anyone willing to sell out, popcorn and gumdrops, while they are creating crepes and filet minon.

Except that everybody would eat crepes and filet minon if it was the same price as popcorn and gumdrops, and although their books are often cheaper than a $30 Stephen King hardcover, people don't even think they're worth that much.

Instead, they're doing the literary equilvelent of oversalting everything, just so they can justify it when nobody cares. It's like when I was in junior high and wouldn't comb my hair. If I didn't try to be attractive and have people like me, at least I would know why they thought I was scuzzy, right? No fear of rejection if I'm already trying to make them reject me, right?

I'm not saying that every published work has to be popcorn. But the best of writing tries it's absolute best to remain accessible to the common man. (Think Guns, Germs and Steel or even Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, which both avoid deep technical explanations or equations, but are straightforward enough that even simpletons like me can understand, even while handling weighty subjects. Both were popular and had substantive content.)

It's the same feeling that drove them to create a separate bestseller list for children's books, so they could hide that J. K. Rowling was creating powerful stories people of all ages cared about, using some of the same archetypes and literary allusions they did, but in a far more accessible and palatable way than they could ever wish to.

The literary emperors have got no clothes, and they're really, really scared somebody's going to notice.

So if you're wondering why the supposedly classy and elite authors are saying such petty and bitter things, and aren't even listing the prize they gave King on their homepage, even when King was nothing but cordial, and even donated the prize money back to their organization--just remember, the entire reason the prize exists is so that the writers can tell themselves they're better than guys like King, even though they haven't touched nearly the number of readers he has.

Phobos Contest: Well, Phobos finally got around to posting thier finalists, and I ain't one of them.

Anybody interested in reading my submission, though, can shoot me an email, and I'll be more than happy to send them a copy. It's called An Ideal Husband, and weighs in at a wee 3,000 words.

Straining at Gnats: Regarding the spat over this BC cartoon, I only have this to say:

If Fred Bassett were scrutinized this closely every time Alex Graham wrote a clunker, he'd have been lynched by now.

(First heard about it from the fine folks at :Freespace:)

Well, now I've seen everything.

The Crystal City This was the novel I bragged about getting to finish due to my disappearance from the internet.

This is actually the sixth book of Orson Scott Card's "Tales of Alvin Maker" series. Card's goal, when he set out, was to create a uniquely American fantasy that drew on the magic and folklore of this nation for its fantastic elements. It also doubles as an alternate history novel, taking place in an 1800's America where France, England and Spain all still have claim on various parts of the continent. (As an example, in this version, George Washington was a British General who was beheaded for refusing to fight the Americans.)

To review the series for you, the first book, Seventh Son, Alvin is born, seventh son of a seventh son, which according to traditional folklore is supposed to make him a healer. However, since all of Alvin's older siblings are still alive, it's even more powerful for him--he ends up a "Maker," with powers over all types of elements.

In the second book, Alvin is kidnapped by Indians, and he finds himself the pupil of Tecumseh and his brother Tenskwa-Tawa of the Shawnee. But ultimately he ends up playing a huge role in the final showdown between the Reds, William Henry Harrison, and, believe it or not, Napoleon.

In the third book, by far my favorite of the six, Alvin prentices to a blacksmith, and learns more about who he is as he tries to help the son of an escaped slave avoid a return to the south.

The fourth book, which is my least favorite of the series, also introduces my favorite character, Verily Cooper, a lawyer with a knack for putting things together. There's also quite a bit of stuff with Napoleon and Honore de Balzac.

Heartfire is my wife's favorite. The main plot deals with witchcraft trials in New England, but it also contains some of the best stuff on slavery I've read in contemporary writing. And, since my wife likes it, you can bet it has its share of romance.

Which leads to the latest book, named after the Crystal City Alvin's known he was going to have to build since Red Prophet. By far the densest and most structurally straightforward of all the books, this book starts in New Orleans (called Nueva Barcelona since it fell back under Spanish rule), and you can pretty much guess where it ends up. (Yup. In a volcano.)

The whole series is worth reading, and as you can see, it tackles the major themes of American history (Frontier life, slavery, puritanism, Indian issues, etc.) and does so in a way that's both interesting and powerful. Check it out.

On Gay "Marriage": First of all, I've always considered marriage more of a religious issue than a legal one, and have considered legislation regarding marriage as being primarily affected by freedom of religion. Consequently, I am loathe to dictate what types of unions can and can't be approved by the government.

However, two points. Gay couples shouldn't pretend they're being discriminated against until everyone calls their union a marriage. Real discrimination is what happens to poligamists, or what used to happen to interracial couples in some states. These people are thrown in jail and locked up. Gay couples are, at least, left alone.

Second, trying to change the definition of marriage is both silly and superfluous. There's a good dialogue on it here, but there's a simpler way to think about it.

Let's say all of this goes down just like homosexuals think they want it to. "Marriage" now includes any union. To distinguish between them, people start calling them "heterosexual marriage" and "homosexual marriage." Everybody realizes these terms are still exclusionary, so finally somebody steps in and gets it decided that the term "heterosexual marriage" must include homosexual marriage. So in order to distinguish between the two, the media starts calling them "heterosexual heterosexual marriage" and "homosexual heterosexual marriage."

Do you see how silly it starts getting? Do you start to understand now why we're fighting to get the definition of marriage left as it is? It's not out of spite, or hate, or some type of conspiracy to control what happens in bedrooms. The fact is they're just different. Why try to make them the same?

Should my poligamist ancestors have tried to get the definition of monogamy changed to include being married to more than one wife? Or should they have strived to help people understand and accept polygamy? Would they have been better off using linguistic tricks to slide under the radar of existing law, or would they have been better off if everybody accepted them for who they actually were and what they were actually doing, and accepted them on those terms?

Well, I haven't just been avoiding blogging, but I've been avoiding the whole freaking Internet for the past few days. How's that gone for me? Well, I've helped my wife around the house more, been going to the gym every day, finished a book (reading, not writing), and got more sleep than I have in months.

I am, however, still finding ways to procrastinate my Nanowrimo novel, and I'm watching more TV than I have in months as well.

Hmmm.....

Don't even bother clicking on it, unless you were tuned in to NBC on Friday nights in the mid-eighties, but thanks to Megachirops over at the Hatrack Forum, I finally got the name of a show I've been trying to figure out since I discovered the internet.

The answer?

Otherworld.

Obscure Movie Review of the Day: The Hulk

Okay, so it's not so obscure.

I don't know quite what went wrong with this film. I really, really want to believe that the problem was that I didn't see it as it was meant to be seen--on a screen 500 miles high, in a theatre full of eight thousand people. I saw it on my little 19 inch TV, and I don't even remember whether I had my glasses on. Yeah. That must be it. Otherwise it would have rocked.

I mean, don't get me wrong. I loved all the ideas of this movie (Okay, all the ideas except the monster poodle. That was a bit of a stretch). I liked the editing, I liked they way they incorporated comic book frames into the scene composition, and I liked how they did the Hulk effects. But somehow, somewhere, something went wrong, and I found myself completely emotionally disconnected at every phase of the movie.

A big part of the problem may have been Nick Nolte, who here reprises his roll as a transient from "Down and Out in Beverly Hills," a movie which I never saw, but did read the MAD Magazine parody of, so I guess I could more accurately say he seems to reprise his roll from the MAD Magazine parody of "Down and out in Beverly Hills." Oh, heck yeah, I believe that thirty years ago he was the world's greatest scientist.

Part of the problem may have been the music. They really try to downplay the music here, maybe trying to get an M. Night sort of feel to the drama, but not quite hitting it. At some points the sound absolutely, positively works. For example, at one part, they make the interesting sound choice of, while a tank is exploding, playing down the sound of the explosion, while we instead hear the sound of Hulk brushing the dust off his hands. Stuff like that should be powerful, really rock. But while I was thinking, "wow, that was a neat sound choice," I wasn't actually feeling anything because of it.

Is this a sign I was overanalyzing the film? Or, more possibly, is it a sign that the movie was maybe overdirected, self-conscious to the point that the style gets in the way of enjoying the movie. Like an author who's so caught up in the "style" of his story that the style is all you notice, and the characters and plot all get swallowed up, a forest you can't see because of the words that, like the proverbial trees, just get in the way.

I hate to say that--especially about Ang Lee, who I think is as much of a genius as anybody who's in Hollywood can claim to be.

I just wish I could have seen it in a theatre. Because I really, really want to like this movie, even after having seen it.

The Crystal City: Orson Scott Card's new Alvin Maker book is coming out this week. Hear the author talk about it here. You can even read the first third of the book online here.

And the signing schedule is here. I'm going to the one in Pasadena on the 11th, if anybody wants to come and hang out.