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Another day like today
I can so do without days like today and furthermore I have frelling proofs to read. It started with getting out of bed later than I wanted to, but this happens a lot when the ME is using me as the birdie in a game of killer badminton, so it’s a kind of groan-where-are-my-glasses-groan-clothing-groan-greet-hellhounds-EEEEK*. I’m usually a lot more awake after the greeting-hellhounds ritual.**
So this morning I was in the middle period where I’ve got some clothes on and the curtains open and am wondering if I’m feeling strong enough yet to face sorting through the 5,637 catalogues that have come in the post, when I heard the beep-beep-beep of a commercial vehicle backing up the cul de sac.
Among my many pet hates are included delivery companies. The Royal Mail is dying because its ineptitude beggars belief*** and nine million delivery companies have sprung up like third cousins twice removed around an elderly emperor without a designated heir, and equally in it only for the money. The thing I like best about these malevolent tapeworms is the way they will give you no indication of when they might arrive—used to be they’d say morning or afternoon, which is at least dealable-with when you’re not a frelling office with a receptionist and you have hellhounds to hurtle, although even without hellhounds staying in for twelve hours for a sodding delivery would drive me bonkers.
The thing I like second best about these jokers is the way they say, oh, you can designate a safe location, we only need your signature in blood† and a small token as hostage—say the deeds of your house. But in the ensuing negotiations†† you discover that they don’t like your designated safe location. Never mind that you’re already signing their bloody triplicate form agreeing that you take responsibility for what happens to your parcel if it is so left . . . no, no, no, they couldn’t possibly, it needs at least six padlocks and a major in the SAS with an extra badge in martial arts on guard. FRELL.
I had just reached this stage with this latest gang of rice-krispie-brains when the weekend happened. And now here is a truck with their logo backing up my cul de sac. I may not have to kill anyone††† this week after all.
Among other distractions throughout this latest engagement with the enemy has been wondering what the hell this object is that it needs its own SAS major. Malevolent tapeworms with rice krispies for brains won’t tell you, which is always one of the most extraordinary aspects of these cases. They’ll deliver the thing—if you finally force them to the wall—but they won’t tell you what it is.
So I signed for it, exchanged pleasantries with the driver‡, took this incredibly large box into my (incredibly) small kitchen, and stood staring at it for a moment. No clue. No frelling clue. It didn’t weigh much for its size either.
I opened it.
Within, swathed in festoons of bubble wrap, was . . . a £15 knapsack I’d bought on sale. Fifteen. Pounds. Small nylon knapsack. And have I mentioned that this particular delivery company, for a mere additional ten pounds, will allow you to designate a specific delivery time?
The day has been kind of downhill from there. Computer Men were here for about two hours . . . but they have to come back.‡‡ I spent an hour and a half talking to Merrilee about the Marketing Plan.‡‡‡
And I went bell ringing. Tonight was the monthly Old Eden practise—the one when I phone round the day before stimulating people to come—and I don’t know if my touch was off or what but I managed to extract fewer high-pitched squeals of agreement than usual. Niall gave me a ride over tonight and I said nervously that I hoped we had an extra bloke or two show up or as second-in-command and, furthermore, not a mere wisp of a thing, as are our two beginners and Old Eden’s tower captain§, I’d find myself round the back end and while the tenor is not wholly lost to virtue the five is possessed by a remarkable assortment of demons. All of Old Eden’s bells are possessed by demons, but if you have to argue with your bell anyway and you’re not the world’s cleverest ringer, you’d rather have a lighter bell. Fortunately the gods, deciding that they’d had enough fun with me today, were kind, and not only Roger§§ but Colin§§§—and Anthea—were there. This responsibility thing is a pain.# But I do like being one of the ringers who ‘catches hold’ when some beginner needs bringing on. And we did zorple through a plain course of Stedman.
All right, all right. Must read proofs.
* * *
* Hellhounds are always very glad to see me in the morning. Hurtle now? they say. Hurtle? Put that apple/pear/grapefruit down, you’re always saying menopause means a higher plane of existence in which food is unnecessary^, which indeed we understand very well^^, we be of one blood, thou and I, even if you’re a funny shape and really slow, let’s hurtle.^^^
^Nobody asked me if I wanted to move to a higher plane of existence
^^ No you do not! I never saw two less menopausal creatures in my life! And all your ribs stick out!
^^^You have arranged about the weather, haven’t you? We feel you are not fulfilling this important duty of dog ownership quite adequately lately.
** Hair standing on end optional. No, wait, maybe I just forgot to comb it.
*** And I have no idea who’s at fault, and I don’t know enough about it to speculate. I only know there are some very nice posties out there, as well as some utter frelling ratbags . . . and an administration clearly made of mouldy string and old carburettors.
† And be sure to press hard, it’s a triplicate form.
†† You can have the paper clip off the deeds to my house, okay?
††† Snap! Crackle! SQUASH!
‡ Most of the drivers for these frelling delivery companies are nice.^ It’s just one more way the admin likes to mess with your head. —Is she crazy enough yet? Is she ready to commit disembowelment on sight? Great! Send her Smilin’ Joe with his fuzzy puppy photos!
^ Except the occasional really scary serial murderer one.
‡‡ Of course. Computer Men always have to come back.
‡‡‡ This conversation degenerated, as they usually do, to me moaning about how it’s the books that matter, promote the frelling books, the whole author as live entertainment thing is all wrong. I’ve decided that it was actually my good fairy who arranged for volatile, overreactive, digestively catastrophic hellhounds. They’re the best excuse for not touring I’ve ever had. Even if it does make me look like one of those pathetic old ladies whose every waking thought is in adoring response to her pet whatever(s). Well. Um . . .
§ Who is tower captain only because she’s our only local, she doesn’t ring much, and weighs maybe seventy-five pounds dripping wet. Wearing full scuba gear with air tank.
§§ Who said that he was responding to a frantic phone call. Hey, I said. Urgent, maybe. Not frantic.
§§§ And Colin turned to me after my stumble through conducting a touch of bob doubles, with a frown on his face—and I cowered, even though Colin is a sweetie and wouldn’t dream of scowling at you merely because you’re a hopeless imbecile—and said, these bells are a lot of work, aren’t they?
# And Vicky will expect a complete report when she gets back from Timbuktu this week.
In Which Our Heroine* Is Hysterical**
Computers are evil. Computers are death. Computers are bane and abomination. I HATE COMPUTERS. HATE. HATE. HATE.
You may possibly remember that last Friday I had semi-promised you the first part of the lullaby from PEGASUS this Friday—?
The day began badly. I was just strapping hellhounds in to the rocket launcher when the phone rang, and it was Peter saying, in a commendably calm tone, that if I get any emails from UPS, not to open them. Peter actually uses UPS, so it was plausible. . . .
Yes. Plausible but hostile. By the time hellhounds and I returned from pounding a little more Hampshire countryside back into place again*** the Trojan horse had burst like a piñata . . . all over the innards of Peter’s computer, which is, for the moment anyway, an ex-computer. One of Asmodeus’ minions is going to fetch it away on Monday and see if any of his incantations† can recall it from the land of the dead. Peter, poor man, has spent most of the day on the phone . . . first trying, under instruction, to limit the damage, which I gather was a bit like trying to claw the tide back from ebbing with a fork, and then trying to convince his laptop that it wasn’t just a typewriter with a screen, it could do computery things, like check email and ask Google questions. But it kept wringing its little memory modules and saying no, no, no! Beat me, spurn me, feed me to hellhounds††, but don’t make me go on line!
Meanwhile I had a piano lesson this afternoon. I’ve actually written the, or anyway some, music for the second and (so far as I know) final part of the lullaby this week, but I trust my own judgement even less than usual with the ME roaring in my ears, so I wanted to take both the corrected first part††† and the new second part to Oisin. He did print it out for me, and I should have just made the final adjustments with a pen, but you know, you have this fabulous, inbloodysanely complicated software for which your husband paid rather a bomb, you want to use it. . . and there was no going back after I’d written a phone number, a succinct shopping list, and the first bar and a half of a new piece across the top of Oisin’s print out.‡
My printer at the mews is one of the reasons I need an Asmodeus minion to pay a visit, and Peter’s ancient but reliable printer is so old that the pages it produces are really not good enough for scanning. So I brought the mews laptop—which is the one with Finale‡‡, my composing software, on it—back to the cottage tonight. And plugged it into the cottage printer, which is the good printer, except when it’s in a bad mood, fired up Finale, and prepared to print out.
Found new hardware, said my computer.
There was an error in gijjeebling with the new hardware, said my computer. New hardware may not work properly.
Then the Install New Hardware Wizard popped up. Go away, I said and closed it.
So I went into ‘printers’ and made sure that the correct printer was ticked. It was. Listen, I’d had Computer Men install the freller on all sixteen‡‡‡ of my computers; I knew it was there. It was there! It was theeeeere!
Went back to Finale. Opened lullaby, hit ‘print’.
Document failed to print, said my computer.
ARRRRGH, I said. I deleted the print queue.
It was now seven-fifteen, and I have to go bell ringing in fifteen minutes. I rebooted.
Found new hardware, said my computer. We don’t like this new hardware. We don’t like its shoes. We don’t like its haircut. The Install New Hardware Wizard popped up again. And cleared its throat meaningfully.
I closed it down again.
I tried to print the lullaby again.
Document failed to print, my computer said again. Gleefully.
The Install New Hardware Wizard leaped out of the shadows, waving exuberantly. Let me solve all your problems! I can go on line and download everything you could ever need!
I’m not in a very good mood about downloading stuff from the internet right now, I said. Let’s try something else.
Then give me the Mystic Install Printer Disk! said the wizard joyfully.
Yes. I found the Mystic Install Printer Disk. Now this is where you think that it’s all going to be all right after all, don’t you? You’d be wrong.
I put the Mystic Disk in the little drawer. It spun. It loaded . . . almost.
It was within a fingernail paring’s breadth of finishing when a Large Red Error Box with Lots of Red Xs in it exploded over the install box, saying, Some Crucial Windows XP Files Have Been Overwritten And You Are in Deep Dog Crap. Give Us Your First Born Child, No, Wait, You’re Too Old For That One, Give Us Your Windows XP Professional Install Disk And We May Save Your Ass. Or, Then Again, We May Not.
Meanwhile, the almost-loaded mystic printer disk is making small flailing motions and trying to boost itself up to peer over the edge of the Large Red Error box. Wait a minute! it says. I was here first! Let me finish!
We Are Windows. We Rule. Get Out of the Way Before We Step on You Like An Outdated Motherboard. Crunch.
I take the mystic printer disk out of the little drawer and put the Windows XP disk in.
Hey, says the New Hardware Wizard. That was bloody rude. Cancel these Windows yobos, whoever the hell they think they are. Put the mystic printer disk back in the drawer. Now.
Don’t Touch Anything, said the Large Red Error Box, or The World Will End in Fire and Peripherals.
Blow me, said the wizard. Let my mystic disk finish loading, or I’m going to crumdang the josselwidgers, and then you’ll be sorry.
You wouldn’t, said the Box.
I would, said the wizard.
At this point I have about eleventy hundred little ‘open’ boxes in hydra-headed heaps on the what-you’re-up-to bar at the bottom of the screen. None of them will close. And nothing else works either. I hit ctrl-alt-delete and the Programme Tyrant box stomps into view, cracking its whip.
Make them behave, I say.
The Programme Tyrant strives mightily for a minute or two but the wizard and the Box are locked in mortal combat. Ow! Dranglefab! WHAP! BLANG! THUMP!
So I turn the whole thing off. CRASH. I can frelling hear the components clanking together like badly rung bells.
And then I run/totter off to tower practise.
So the story thus far: I need Blogmom to load the sheet music to the lullaby on the blog. This means I have to print it out, scan it back in again, and tack it on as an attachment to an email, and send it to her. I have, thus far, done none of these things.
Tune in tomorrow for the next exciting episode.
* * *
* You may replace this with ‘matriarch’ if you prefer
** Yes, I do read too much Wondermark.^ http://wondermark.com/ Wait, is it possible to read too much Wondermark?
http://wondermark.com/601/ Ahem, says she who eats everything with chopsticks.
^ Does he do matriarchs? I don’t remember matriarchs
*** Landscape gets uppity if you don’t tramp on it regularly. See, you’re helping save the planet when you go for walks. It’s not just a question of your waistline.
† Asmodeus is expecting Peter to provide his own dragon’s blood, eyelash of salamander and powdered mandrake root. At the prices they charge, I feel these should be included.
†† Ha ha ha ha ha. Although you don’t know, they might have a taste for computer components.
††† And a good thing I did, since I’d managed to make one of the corrections backwards
‡ Like we aren’t frelling drowning in second sheets, from all those blank-backed galley proofs. We have scratch paper for the next million years.
‡‡ Having now had it, used it, and been slapped around by it for a year and a half or so, I like the name no more than I did in the beginning. It said, You’ve had it! You’re finished!, a year and a half ago, and it still says, You’ve had it! You’re finished! to me now.
‡‡‡ Well. Four. And one of ’em’s retired.
Look at what arrived in the post today:
Another writer friend—let’s call her Rosalind—sent it, saying that I could take notes on PEG II in it, and included a bookmark with a teeny weeny pegasus on it.* And if you want such a notebook, you can get it here: http://longbarnbooks.com/ , where indeed it appears in a number of guises. Oooh. I may have to have the tea mug too.**
This is the same friend who gave me a tote bag*** with Erasmus’ deathless remark on it: ‘When I get a little money, I buy books. And if there is any left over, I buy food.’ † It’s good to have friends. After the previous few days and the immediate few days to come in the world of publishing††, friends are even more necessary than usual.†††
And I have to go to bed early so that I can be not merely awake but functional by 8:30 a.m. tomorrow. Sunday service ring isn’t till eight forty five.‡ Fedex’s delivery hours are any time from 8:30 to 6. Isn’t that lovely? Isn’t that charming? I don’t understand why we are swamped in terrible delivery services—there must be a dozen of the wretched things, all of them with oversized logo-besmirched vehicles clogging up our roads and polluting our atmosphere—when there is obviously a gigantic market niche for a good one. Eight thirty a.m. to six p.m.: this means, for example, that if you’re a private individual who maybe needs a pee occasionally, let alone has hellhounds with a high hurtling requirement, you can’t even get your friendly local health food store to take delivery for you‡‡ because ordinary shops are open something like 9 to 5:30. I may or may not get a cup of tea and a rant with Oisin tomorrow‡‡‡ at the end of the day—but if Fedex doesn’t arrive till 6:05 I’ll be hanging from the ceiling and eating the wallpaper.§ If it arrives at all, of course. Fedex: Sure We’ll Guarantee It. Ptttht. We Don’t Give A Damn, and We Don’t Care Who Knows It.
* * *
* I have, however, got the wind up badly about pegasus merchandise. I hadn’t thought about this—not that thinking has ever got me much of anywhere about the books I write—till Tasmin sent me about a dozen pegasus-decorated refrigerator magnets, each one more terrifyingly ugly than the last. Zowie. I was afraid to put them up because they might give the hellhounds nightmares.^ I disengaged with unicorns decades ago as a result of unicorn merchandise. ^^ Maybe I could write a novel about warthogs. Or threadworms. I think it would be hard to attract many corporate investors with threadworm kitchen magnets.
^ For those of you not over-acquainted with the floor plan at the cottage, I have a kitchen the size of a Smart Car. It contains a table, a tallboy, an Aga+, and a hellhound crate. With difficulty. And an assortment of dwarf appliances crammed under the stairs. The refrigerator is immediately opposite the hellhound crate. The crate door has just enough clearance to open past the refrigerator. Just. Sometimes it hooks a magnet or two in its sweep.
+ http://www.johnwraycountrystoves.co.uk/image20.html Theirs is a lot cleaner. Also you don’t get the same effect when it’s not WEDGED among its environs.
Mine came with the cottage. I like green, it’s okay. But I didn’t know they came in pink. http://www.aveccookers.co.uk/aga-cookers-choosing.htm Never mind. Pink would be really hard to keep clean.
^^ I have elsewhere mentioned my rage and despair when unicorns insisted on invading ROSE DAUGHTER. I keep telling you what happens in my stories is not up to me.
** I’d love to know the context; a hasty Google^ isn’t bringing up anything useful. But Louisa was a character—a single, income-earning, family-supporting woman who worked for women’s rights in an era when all of this was frowned on—she could be saying it in a story or out of it, and with almost any level of irony. Is anyone still reading her thrillers? BEHIND A MASK and so on? They’re dreadful. Really, really, really dreadful . . . but with a kind of intoxicating, page-turning, gothic fascination. They make Wilkie Collins’ THE WOMAN IN WHITE, say, seem positively inhibited.
^ I have to go back to work here in a minute. —Sleep? That would be what?
*** Or I’d probably be looking at the Alcott tote bag as well. I may be anyway. A woman can never have too many tote bags. The Erasmus is full of plant catalogues at the moment. I was ordering snowdrops yesterday to cheer myself up. And I’ve only just discovered that magnolia stellata comes in pink. http://www.hort.net/gallery/view/mag/magksjp/ Speaking of pink. As I often am.
† I’d give you a photo of it too only it and my camera flash don’t get along. I can’t find it on the web, although other editions of it exist. http://www.zazzle.co.uk/when_i_get_a_little_money_i_buy_books_bag-149606564280811630
Or how about this incarnation: http://www.cafepress.co.uk/brownbagdesigns.79598963
†† Mmmmngghthrmmph. Professional prudence—and a judicious fear of Merrilee’s wrath—keep me silent. Unfortunately. Mmmmmngghthrmmph.
††† I also made a dog’s dinner of ringing last night. Siiiiigh. Niall, who occasionally has pity on the feckless, did not mention my diabolical new status at our home tower to the assemblage at our usual Wednesday practise in Ditherington. He exercised no such restraint tonight at handbells with Colin: feh. And Colin is on the list of Top Ten Worst Teases in the Universe. Feh. However we were all going radically wrong tonight. That was you! No, that was you! No, that was all of us, plus hellhounds and the ghost.
‡ And I don’t have to sign my name Sunday mornings. Although with the new electronic berserker screens all the delivery services have now that you scrabble at with a plastic sylus, neither legible nor identifiable is an issue any more.
‡‡Our friendly local health food shop is happy to take delivery occasionally for good customers. Peter orders my Green & Black’s mint chocolate from them. By the box. You don’t need to know any more, do you?
‡‡‡ I’ve done a little work on my choral masterpiece A Pox Upon Their Heads this week, but not really enough to be worth showing.
§ The cottage doesn’t have wallpaper.
Havoc, various and extreme
My editor’s assistant is very on the spot, bless her, and while the copyedited ms of PEGASUS in all its red-pencilled, Post-Itted glory* isn’t due to arrive till Thursday**, she sent me the copyeditor’s queries last night so I can at least get started on the more or less substantive stuff, as opposed to the melting-down-over-the-question-of-semicolons stuff, which will have to await arrival of the large square boulder of typescript. Or printerscript.
I am, of course, hyperventilating.*** Deadlines crunch underfoot like the ice that I hope is not out there forming after yesterday’s rain and today’s temperature plunge. Anxiety, foreboding and self-doubt fleet gibbering past like wraiths. And I have a headache that feels like being thwacked repeatedly by the Chrysler Building †. And I may be getting a job tomorrow at the recycling plant, sorting plastic bottles and cardboard boxes. Or old computer components. I’m not fussy.
And I haven’t even told you yet about the latest edition of SUNSHINE which they’re shoving through in some kind of inside-out Douglas-Adams timeframe†† to take advantage of some opportunity for a special promotion last week or something, and they sent me the cover roughs today which there is no time to do much about except keep going and I recognise that they are hip and flash and attention-catching and even pretty on their own terms but I can’t even breathe this fast††† let alone make decisions and AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUGH.
NO PRESSURE OR ANYTHING.
* * *
OKAY. IT’S OFFICIAL. FEDEX HAS SCREWED UP, AND I’M NOT GETTING PEGASUS ON THURSDAY.
KILL ME. KILL ME NOW.
* * *
* Yup. Hard copy. I’m old and feeble and retro and sad.^ Most of this publishing doodah happens electronically these days, except among those of us who are old and feeble and retro and sad. We agreed to deal with the copyedited FIRE electronically, and it frelling near killed me.^^ Probably a great many of my mysterious aches and pains have nothing to do with hellhounds, large heavy potted plants, boxes of books, or cranky bells, but are the result of those pins various publishing people are sticking in wax figures labelled ‘Robin’. She gets her damn book in four months late and she wants the copyedit in HARD COPY? What did I do with those hat pins?
^ And I compulsively reread Calvin and Hobbes. When I get to the bottom of the pile+ I start over. Aside from the astonishingly high level of inspired lunacy Watterson maintained, I like the way Calvin’s parents sit around reading books. I read a strip today where Calvin’s mom is using a typewriter. The copyright date is 1987—that’s only twenty-three years ago! The usual date of the invention of the world-wide web is 1989, isn’t it? And PCs (and Macs) as more than a geek phenomenon are only about ten years older than that. I know, I know, the world does keep changing, but this is the first time I’ve been old, and I think the electronic revolution is pretty amazing.
Robin McKinley is on Twitter? Robin McKinley who was given a phone machine as a house-warming present back in Maine because her nearest and dearest were sure that after she and her phone-answering housemates went their separate ways they would never hear from her again?
I’ve been trying to find that joke about the bathtub and the phone: The bathtub was invented in 1850 and the telephone in 1875.++ This means you could sit in the tub for twenty-five years before the phone rang.
If you turned the phone off, you could sit in the tub for 125 years before your email pinged. You’d be pretty wrinkly by then though.
+ Of course I have them all. I am a card-carrying obsessive. You know this.
++ Except that the bathtub was invented either by the Romans in BCE quack quack something, or by Thingummy in 1883 who came up with the trick of enamelling of a large iron basin, and the phone really was invented in 1875 or thereabouts. Never mind. I still like the joke.
^^ Sheer chronological age is not necessarily the determining factor. Peter coped. I didn’t. And he can remember twenty five more internetless years than I can.
** IT HAD BETTER BE GOING TO ARRIVE ON THURSDAY. I’VE ONLY GOT TILL NEXT THURSDAY TO TURN IT AROUND. AS I SIT HERE, TWITCHING EVERY TIME MY EMAIL PINGS^, THE MS. HAS NOT YET ARRIVED AT MY PUBLISHER, WHICH MEANS MY PUBLISHER HAS NOT YET SENT IT OUT.
It’s bad enough that sodding Fedex delivers when they feel like it, so while they guarantee 48 hours, they don’t tell you which end of the forty-eight, so to speak, so Peter is going to house-sit while I’m hurtling hellhounds. On Thursday. If it’s Thursday. It’s looking bad for Thursday. OH. GODS.
^Fortunately I am not sitting in the bath. It occurs to me that the real reason I find myself incapable of going to bed at a decent, civilised hour, is because I like to lie in the bath and read. At mmmph o’clock in the morning the phone very rarely rings.+
+ Although Peter scared me silly ringing at 11:15 from Elsewhereshire this weekend. Eleven-fifteen is, of course, the mere shank of the evening by my standards, but anyone who rings me after about 9 pm~ earns my undying opprobrium. (I’m still not a big fan of the telephone.) Ordinarily I would make an exception for Peter, but what was he doing in Elsewhereshire this weekend when he should have been at home bringing me cups of strong hot stomach-quelling tea and frosted flutes of medicinal champagne?
~ Or before about . . . never mind.
*** The funny thing is that today is pretty much the first day that PEG II has not felt like a Giant Spiky Monster which is going to roll over me juggernaut-fashion and leave me a little blot on the carpet^, but a story I might conceivably manage to tell.^^ The last two or three weeks or whatever it’s been it’s been like, No! Go away! I’ve done all that! What do you mean it’s not finished! Of course it’s finished! I know when I’ve finished a novel! Sequel! I don’t frelling do sequels, and if you say that again I will make you eat my desktop!^^^
^ To go with various other recent blots on the carpet. What a good thing we go in for patterned carpets.
^^ I say nothing about finishing it by next autumn.
^^^Which is the computer whose email is still not working.
† Point down, of course. This is all part of the Giant Spiky Monster metaphor.
†† “Oh no, not again.”
††† Especially when I’m hyperventilating
Leftover Twitter
Way way long ago I didn’t finish responding to some forum comments that I meant to respond to, because I ran out of time/energy/brain/thingummywhatsit logic. Since then there have been a lot more comments I have meant to respond to and I haven’t managed to do that either. But here’s a start on the end of the thread that followed ‘A few days ago this happened on Twitter’:
hedgehog wrote in response to my:
| Alternatively I can snicker and say, this is why I write *cheap genre,* and not LIT’RATURE. |
You can say it, but I won’t agree. “Lit’rature” isn’t what the Critic says it is; it’s what people of good taste choose to read, across generations and epochs. Real people will be reading Robin McKinley’s books with intense pleasure a century from now — and perhaps a millenium, or three! — and the self-proclaimed Critics of that future Day will be pretending that her works are “Lit’rature” because they study it. The truth is: it’s Literature because we read it, not because the Critic blesses it . . .
. . . I do know why I haven’t managed to make those thoughtful, considered responses; because thoughtful and considered take too much time and energy (and thingummywhatsit) and I’m always writing the blog at the end of the day when I’m running downhill fast and the 1,000,000 things I haven’t done yet that I was absolutely going to get done today are bleating in my ear and when I’m at the mews, and I usually am at the mews in the evenings, the piano is right behind me as I sit at the kitchen table and she doesn’t have to bleat or murmur. Or sing. She just sits there and looms.* It’s a lot easier to write blog entries about bell ringing and hellhound hurtling and then maybe get back to the piano before I totally crash for the night/morning. And the question of ‘lit’rature’ or the worth of one story or another or one sort of story or another is important.
I have an aggrieved relationship with ‘lit’rature’. In the first place, I got my BA in it. And there’s nothing like a few semesters in a rarefied intellectual atmosphere—especially a tweedy, masculine rarefied intellectual atmosphere—to bring out the not-very-hidden hellgoddess in me. I can feel my blood pressure rising just remembering my two and a half years in the Bowdoin College English Department. Bad language. Well, that was a long time ago, and I hope that as the memory of the first years of women undergraduates** fades to that neutral history colour the whole patriarchal thing at Bowdoin has died a painful, richly deserved death.***
But one of the things that struck me then, even then, in my more-intimidated-than-I-was-going-to-admit, flimsy, emotional, female way, is that there were at least two kinds of literature: pretentious and silly. And dead. Sometimes the dead stuff was pretentious and silly too, but a lot of the ‘stood the test of time’ stuff is just rip-snorting good story telling, if you’re a fluent enough reader to get past some (mostly) minor language and social strangeness.† Charles Dickens and George Eliot, for example, were the rock stars of their day—Dickens even toured like one.†† They wrote populist crap! They wrote cheap genre! They just happened to write extremely good cheap genre, which is to say . . . literature.
Pollyanna forbids me to mention any names of current ‘literary’ authors I think write cheap pretentious-and-silly genre. And I’m sufficiently aware of myself as an evil-cow reader to accept that some of my loathings are just me being an evil cow and the work’s good. Some of it, however, isn’t, and in a hundred years nobody will be bothering with it.††† When I talk about writing cheap genre I’m saying this half sardonically and half proudly. If you’re right that people will be reading Robin McKinley in a hundred years, I’ll have become literature too, because I write good populist crap.
Maren also responding to:
| Alternatively I can snicker and say, this is why I write *cheap genre,* and not LIT’RATURE |
I think I’ve mentioned before that my beloved 17th-century conteuses deliberately chose the very frivolous fairy tale genre because they knew most critics would not take them seriously enough to suspect them of anything subversive (political allegory, Girls Who Do Things, jokes at the expense of males–all of which did feature prominently in their stories, of course), so they were relatively free to explore the issues that interested them without interference.*
But still they apparently couldn’t resist a dig at critics when the opportunity presented itself. I can’t find which story or even which author this was right now, but one of them said in an aside that some critic was surely going to protest a huntsman in her story having a musket, since it was set many centuries before her time. She preemptively responded to this unseen critic that there were talking animals in the story, so there could certainly be anachronistic muskets as well.
*Which is not to say some critics didn’t still hate them (notably Boileau who mentioned fairy tales in his tenth satire, Against Women), but that was more disdain than criticism of the actual works.
I am proud to be a fellow fairy tale reteller in this company.
emljones:
There are even books that don’t suck dead bears, but DO have technical flaws that keep them from reaching their potential… i.e., book I read recently in which the name of a minor but significant character CHANGED partway through! I finished the book puzzled as to whether the publisher had fired all the editors, or what.
Oh dear. I think you’re being a bit harsh if you’re going to declare a book hasn’t reached its potential because there was a small but glaring editorial failure. I try different names for characters sometimes when I feel prickly-itchy about someone, when it seems to me I’m failing to ‘hear’ their real name and am still trying to get the mumble in my ear to turn into nice sharp consistent letters on the page. I occasionally don’t get them all changed to the final result—the same final result—especially when I never do manage to assuage the prickle-itch—and then I have to hope that someone questions the renegades. But the mortality of writers, editors and proofreaders is a source of continuing permanent dismay to all of us on both sides of the Great Publishing Divide. And it keeps most of us on this side of the divide awake nights.
But criticism is a tricky thing. I’m an academic and my writing is for academic journals, and . . . I’ve discovered that when I find myself saying any version of “this person just doesn’t understand” I’m usually resisting some well-founded criticism. But . . . academic work (mine, anyway) is almost always work in process so criticism can be used for the next article. It’s writing as learning process, rather than creation of a story.
It’s something I’ve always wondered – are reviews useful for fiction authors, at all?? I’m getting the sense from everyone here that a useful (for the author, that is) fiction review is at best exceedingly rare!
I don’t know about everyone here. And perhaps it depends on what you mean by ‘review’; a lot of writers like to work by workshopping, when they send work-in-progress out for criticism, and then use that collected criticism as a basis for rewrites. And I know writers who read every published review of every published book with close attention because they expect to learn something from it that they can use writing their next book.
I’m not like that. I am a solitary clunch, and a ratbag with it. First, last and most of the middle . . . I listen to the story. And I only listen to the story. Other voices are an infuriating distraction. This is why I don’t send early drafts out for reader responses. Reader responses will only confuse the issue. The story will tell me what it wants and needs. The more closely I listen to it the better I will write it. Go away and leave me alone and let me get on with it.
I have a fairly similar response to reviews of the published work. It is vanishingly rare that a reviewer—back in the days when I still read negative reviews—told me something that I could use. They may be right that this, that or the other thing fails for this, that or the other reason. I am not saying that I write flawless, unimpeachable prose limning‡ lapidary plots and breathtakingly exquisite and agonisingly resonant characters.‡‡ I am saying that I’m my stories’ best and, effectively, only, arbiter. This isn’t arrogance‡‡‡; it’s the way my story-telling faculty is built.
librarykat
I don’t know if reviews are useful for the authors; I know that many libraries depend on them for collection development purposes. A library’s collection development policy may say that it will only purchase books and other materials that have at least two positive reviews in certain qualified journals (usually library professional journals, Publishers Weekly, etc). . . .
Yes. Bingo. And this is precisely why snarky, subjective, axe-grinding, soap-box, having-a-bad-day, don’t-like-this-genre, this-isn’t-the-book-I-wanted-to-read, this-isn’t-the-book-this-author-should-have-written, the-world-should-be-a-different-shape-because-I-say-so reviews make me incandescent. As I say, I don’t read my own reviews any more unless Merrilee clears them first—why should I make myself miserable (because I will make myself miserable) over a bad review when it won’t do anything but make me miserable?—but I read other people’s, and there are a lot of reviewers I have seriously wanted to whap up longside the head. Of course there are a lot of writers I want to whap up longside the head. I’m generous with my whapping impulse. But this is the real world where people have to earn a living as well as the artistic world where we’re trying to hang a few more stars in the interdimensional firmament, and every snarky review loses that author sales§ that he/she probably needs to pay the mortgage and feed the hellhounds. I’m not talking about either deserved trashings or genuine uncertainty or puzzlement or even flat dislike. These happen, like hailstones and headaches (speaking from the recipient’s point of view). I’m talking about blind prejudice and sheer bleeding snark, for which there is no excuse.
Ah, life on earth with people. What a snakepit. I’m one of those overdone crusty types with a mushy centre however: I still believe most people are good at heart, do their best, and mean well. But it’s like Other Dogs: it only needs one or two that try and take your or your sweet hellhounds’ faces off to give you a somewhat twitchy attitude toward the sight of a few more of them streaking toward you across the greensward. Or the whitesward, lately.
* * *
* And speaking of 1,000,000 undone things, I’ve been trying to remember for weeks to ring the piano tuner.
** I’m pretty sure I’ve told you this: I was a transfer student, but I graduated in the first class of women who’d been there all four years.
*** What, me still pissed off, thirty years later? Little benign, forebearing me?
† Crinolines are rarely seen these days, and chaperones are pretty thin on the ground. I find that at this stage of my life the thing I find most troubling in reading my beloved Victorians is the racism. I’m somehow better able to say oh, go sit on a pitchfork, about all that melting femininity.
†† And while I don’t think cocaine had anything to do with it, he effectively died of it.
††† They’ll be producing their own silly and pretentious pseudo-lit, of course. It’s not like this ever goes away.
‡ ‘to limn’: one of my most-hated verbs. Right up there with ‘to craft’. Craft is a noun.
‡‡ Ick, actually
‡‡‡ Well, it may be arrogance too
§ A topic for another evening is whether All Attention Is Good Attention. The short answer is no. All notoriety may be good notoriety. I don’t know; I don’t have paparazzi leaping out of my shrubbery. But at the level of needing to make library sales to make ends meet, yes, negative reviews cost.
