It's so awful being a straight male novelist; the culture just won't stop smalling me.
(I am assuming that Franzen wasn't alluding, in that remark, to Whitehead's being black? Which would also be grody anyway?)
That is the ouroboros of terrible 20th century anxietydude fiction.
Maybe Franzen had gotten confused and read I Am Charlotte Simmons by mistake?
Fucking Franzen. I hate him so. The Intuitionist is great, and of all female protagonists, to accuse this protagonist of being her author's fantasy sex object is really something. And of course it is especially rich coming from Franzen, author of many terribly rendered women, all of whom will probably someday have to be portrayed by poor benighted Annette Benning, who is forever in my mind associated with portraying misogynist caricatures of women. (Sorry, Annette Benning!) In conclusion, ugghhghgh fuck him.
It's so … something … that he notes this discomfiture in a review of a different book.
poor benighted Annette Benning, who is forever in my mind associated with portraying misogynist caricatures of women. (Sorry, Annette Benning!)
And, worse, cursed to have her name misspelled. Sorry, Annette Bening!
Wow. I retroactively feel better about having been left cold by The Corrections. (I can never remember what it's called -- I loved Roddy Doyle's The Committments, and there was a band from my high school called The Connotations, and together they block the Franzen title.)
The last sentence of 6 says everything that needs to be said, but I do have to give Franzen credit for adapting the "I only have threesomes with two women because I am a feminist" to the cause of why he doesn't need to make women protagonists.
Not just that he himself doesn't need to make women protagonists, but that it's actively unseemly for any other man to write about women. He is some piece of work. (Well, he was in 2001. I suppose he might have gotten better.)
So . . . is it only female protagonists written by men that give Franzen the squicks? What about female supporting characters? Or love interests of the male protagonist? How are they not "doing double duty as the novelist's fantasy sex object"?
I have a copy of Dale Peck's Hatchet Jobs, which I feel vaguely guilty for owning (I bought it for the infamous "Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation" review).
John Henry Days is one of the victims in that book, but it's too bad Peck never reviewed Franzen (or maybe he has an I missed it). It seems like Franzen is the ideal subject for Peck's particular talents as a reviewer.
Ugh, Franzen. How is he even allowed to write in public.
It won't surprise anyone that I've never managed to read anything by franzen!
5: I loved it when Fafblog referred to that book as I Am Easily Amazed
Franzen is both of poor character and not very smart. Naturally, he is a rich and famous author.
Is there some kind of secret code here about Claire Huxtable?
I find it kind of crushing that Franzen's reputation as a first-class sexist gives him more publicity than he would otherwise get, even with the attention-seeking rants about Twitter, etc. This seems like the opposite of what ought to happen in a just world. (Which is not by any means to suggest that I'm surprised. I know how the world works and shit. It's still an unfortunate mixture of critical acclaim and social opprobrium.)
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If I want to cap off and send this dissertation chapter, should I stop listening to all this prog and start listening to something more... efficient?
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Maybe this rather than the analingus post is the one where it might be worth noting that Elizabeth Wurtzel is writing about herself again and seems to think she's now all healthy and together.
I'm going to google this and find that she's marrying Tom Green or Gary Busey or something.
I stand by my love for The Corrections, a love that has earned me brickbats in these parts before, but Franzen's public statements put him somewhere in the neighborhood of Ezra Pound's wartime broadcasts for Fascist Italy.
Oddly enough, Franzen's first wife Valerie Cornell was the granddaughter of Pound's lawyer in that treason case.
I wish you hadn't used that word, Thorn. Now I have a perverted Garcia earworm -- "Your rain falls like analingus". This is not helping my attempts to write about why creationism seems a uniquely immoral form of ignorance.
Getting pissed of about what an writer you don't like said in a book review of a book no one remembers 13 years ago is the Internetiest thing ever. That Tolstoy joke in the link is funny though.
25: You can comfort yourself by thinking how it's not nearly as offensive as some of the anti-semitic stuff Dostoyevsky wrote in his self-published diary.
32. Mix it up with a shuffle among Nina Nastasia, Tania Tagaq, and Amede Ardoin
Oh and Franzen's 27th City, which I think is actually pretty good, has a female protagonist for a bunch of chapters. Franzen seems to be an idiot in this review and in interviews, definitely.
But for instance, the bit with earning a living by writing fake copy for financiers trying to find suckers to invest in Baltic companies was pretty good, among other pieces. This seems to come up pretty often here, where a book gets dismissed because the author is personally objectionable.
I should mention in the interest of completeness that I stopped reading The Corrections because it irritated me ages before I learned that Franzen was a doofus extra-authorially.
34: Oh, right. The mayor? Who is of South Asian descent? I remember liking that book too -- I don't remember it that well, except that it was enormously weird.
"Personally objectionable" doesn't really apply when criticizing a writer for things he writes, like book reviews.
36. Police chief, I think, possibly also a hottie. Possibly JF has a problem with drink or drugs?
I should mention in the interest of completeness that I stopped reading The Corrections because it irritated me ages before I learned that Franzen was a doofus extra-authorially.
Me too!
36: It's funny that Franzen ended up as the darling of the middlebrow "literary" set when The 27th City was basically a potboiler.
37. Disagree that a review is the same as his own work. Even if one includes it, some bad work doesn't in my mind distract from good work. That said, I haven't read anything JF wrote since The Corrections, not in a hurry to either. He's a competent realist when he's writing well, basically.
I haven't read Whitehead though his books look interesting-- anyone here like him?
40: well, see also Lethem, Chabon.
40. So was White Teeth which I also enjoyed, and which also made Zadie Smith popular.
I feel vaguely bad that I've not read any Chabon. Not bad enough to read a whole novel.
30: Ok, first of all, I don't think no one remembers John Henry Days. Secondly, I, at least, am less pissed off than flabbergasted. Where was the editor on this? Who could possibly have thought this was appropriate?
Thing is it's close to being a good point. If he'd just said "John Henry Days is better because, among other things, this guy isn't very good at writing convincingly from a female point of view, so it's a pity his last one didn't have a male narrator too" then fair enough. But then he had to go all weird.
One interesting thing is that literary fiction is now almost as specifically a female genre as are Harlequin Romances (something between 80 and 90 percent of literary fiction sold is bought by women). So you'd have to guesstimate that 75%, maybe more, of people who have bought and read The Corrections are women, and also that Franzen knows this. A lot of what's going on with him is probably gender anxiety about his audience.
42: How dare you call Gun, with Occasional Music a potboiler!!!
"I dreamt as a lad of penis jousting with Norman Mailer, but the soccer moms of NPR paid for my Brooklyn townhome" is a lot of what's going on.
I can believe that the majority of literary fiction is bought by women, but 80-90%?
48 & 50 are spot on, and also speaking from the edge of the target demographic his anxiety is not misplaced. I find him ludicrous and easily missable.
I was told 88% by someone at Hachette a few years ago, when I asked.
50: in fact, what launched him into celebrity was the Oprah book club contretemps.
OT: Oh, look, another philosophosplosion.
41: Yes, I liked The Intuitionist.
47: You can strike "now": male anxiety about working in a female-coded genre (and, differently expressed, female anxiety about working in a female-coded genre) is basically the history of the English novel, maybe excepting an anomalous period in the mid-twentieth century.
48: Is it truly insulting to callGun, With Occasional Music, which I also like, a good and inventive potboiler? I haven't read many such.
58: My impression is that the reading audience for novels was mostly women from very early on. I think some of the earliest criticisms of novels by public moralists and scolds had to do with their supposedly bad influence on their female readers.
48, 49: I was thinking of Motherless Brooklyn (which I liked a lot) because I haven't read Gun, With Occasional Music but... it is, right? I should really read it.
I'm currently reading the new David Mitchell so, you know, my brow charts a measured course.
57, 58, 59: Paging AWB. AWB to the white courtesy phone...
And yes, it is. Sifu, I'm surprised you haven't read it; it seems like it would be up your alley.
My better half has a date to go hear Mitchell give a talk tonight, suffice to say he didn't choose the event. But there was full disclosure when he was asked, so I'm confident he'll be polite in his post-talk chit chat! Not clear to me the asker knows he was far off the mark in selecting the event, but they're both are UKians so not sure if that argues for mutual impenetrability or some kind of telepathy?
The new Mitchell's pretty readable, I dunno. I feel like maybe the movie retroactively made his books stupider? I choose to reject that.
59. categories of novel over time, from Moretti. Nautical and Military show up in 1820.
Speaking of books, Halford, do you have a recommendation for best paleo book?
67: I'm glad to hear that. I'm fifth on the library's list or something, but still looking forward to it.
69: This should get you started.
67: I dunno, I liked it fine, but "Cloud Atlas" was pretty stupid even before the movie came out.
58: Yes. I'm not the specialist in the period that AWB is, but off the top of my head, that was also the age of Eliza Haywood, Aphra Behn, Fanny Burney, Ann Radcliffe... not that dudes weren't writing, but that particular dudely "Rise of the Novel" canon was assembled by a later age. Even sticking to hyper-canonical works, all the meta conversation in Northanger Abbey is a perfectly good document of how feminized the form was. Nathaniel Hawthorne's complaint about the "damned mob of scribbling women" has many precursors.
I quite liked The Intuitionist, thought John Henry Days was pretty meh, and skipped Whitehead's zombie book. Franzen is a peen and a bad novelist and can go stick his dick in a blender for all I care, although then perhaps we'd miss his fecundity.
I read Cloud Atlas mostly because it was so highly praised in these parts, and eh, it was okay. And then I read several of his other books, and they were also basically fine, except for Jacob de Zoet one, which was puzzlingly terrible.
I loved The Intuitionist. Then someone gave me a copy of Sag Harbor and jesus, that was all but unreadable.
73: I am not denying that, particularly. But it might be stupider now.
I sustained mild interest in Cloud Atlas all the way up to the midpoint when it started cycling back, at which moment, in a blinding instant, the remaining structure of the book was made clear, and I foresaw that nothing remained save some hand-waving at a concept of interconnection... of different lives... across time and space...
Also, choosing Riddley Walker as one of your targets of pastiche is really playing with fire.
choosing Riddley Walker as one of your targets of pastiche is really playing with the Littl Shynin Man, Mr. Clevver
73/6: It was one of two books I've read that inspired people to come talk to me about how deep and fantastic it was while I was reading it in public. The other was a Dan Brown book. People who interrupt my reading have odd taste. The guy almost "spoiled" it, but, like lk in 78, I'd gotten the drift.
Now this thread is making me introspect about whether I think the new David Mitchell is stupid independent of any movies that might have been released and... I might think it's quite stupid. Oh well. I'll still finish it.
The genderedness of reading interruption is interesting. Based on my anecdata, women who read Ulysses in public are always getting accosted, while men who read Ulysses in public are shunned.
The resurgence of "peen" around here has caused "ball-peen hammer" to keep echoing in my head.
John Henry Days was quite good and well worth the remaindered hardcopy. I also liked the NYer excerpt from his (memoir? roman a clef?) about Hamptonsing while black.
27 and 50 have made terrific contributions to my morning. Anyone who doubts 47-50 should recall the great Franzen-Oprah affair, where he managed to snob his way out of being in Oprah's book club.
Speaking of men writing female characters, have we discussed Norman Rush here? A novelist friend recommended Mating to take along on my (first) honeymoon, saying it was one of the best female characters ever written by a male novelist. I loved the book, and have recommended it to three women who, shall we say, did not find the main character especially lifelike. I have come to suspect that Norman Rush, as much as I love him, writes female narrators who are one-notch-more sophisticated wish-fulfillment machines.
Counter-anecdote! Mating was independently recommended to me by two Ladies who liked the Narrating Lady. Also, I remember an odd interview where Rush explained he had repeatedly run all his drafts by his wife to get stamped with Feminine Authenticity.
86: Amazing! I am beginning to suspect that contrary to everything written to the contrary, not all women are the same. Psychology will have to be revised!
78.2/79 are damn true, and that pastiche might be even worse than the Riddley Walker pastiche in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.
82 is highly plausible. Presumably the shunned men are the ones accosting the accosted women.
contrary to everything written to the contrary
Well-said, peep!
Getting pissed of about what an writer you don't like said in a book review of a book no one remembers 13 years ago is the Internetiest thing ever.
This made me laugh.
Despite what "even worse" might suggest, I like that section of Beyond Thunderdome, or remember liking it, not having seen the movie in yonks.
Mating was recommended to me by a lady!
I'm reading this in links, which doesn't support italics, so comments like 92 are more suggestive than they would otherwise be.
"I dreamt as a lad of penis jousting with Norman Mailer, but the soccer moms of NPR paid for my Brooklyn townhome" is a lot of what's going on.
This made me laugh, too. It's like Dave Chappelle for weeny white guys.
Mating was recommended to me by a lady!
82: I read Ulysses on the bus for a few months. If I'm remembering correctly, I was accosted twice -- not sure if that's the right word -- at different times, two men started talking to me about it -- I recall one asking if I planned on reading Finnegan's Wake. I didn't sense any romantic intent. (for those keeping score, who have failed to keep score until now, peep is a cis-gendered male).
Just read some Kojin Karatani on "Origins of Modern Japanese Literature" and his mention of Naoya Shiga, father of the "Watakushi shÅsetsu" and then the fifty pages available of This Excellence at google books.
As usual, much to learn about the West from the Japanese experience. The Japanese literati had a lot of trouble in early Meiji adapting to and understanding the Western tradition of the novel, because with few exceptions narrative prose and what might be encompassed under the rubric of "The Everyday" was relegated to kana, triviality and humour, and women's writing. Real manly men wrote essays, philosophy and philology, and especially lyric poetry, e.g., haiku.
Naoya Shiga managed to recreate the novel-short story in a form and content that viewed the everyday under a lens of zen, without psychology, character and growth or any larger social context and set a pattern that endures today. A masculine Japanese modernism.
One hesitates to gender this stuff, and of course it's all dated now, but a case has been made that the Western novel prose fiction-form at its modernist peak was dedicated to the quotidian:Bloom frying kidney and looking for Sweets of Sin under Molly's bed; Hemingway fishing; Castorp basking; Dalloway planning.
The gendering is about whether or not the domestic and quotidian is itself "gendered," and whether styles themselves are gendered, if only perhaps within the enforced roles of patriarchy. I prefer "Cloacal" (Joyce) vs "Phallic" (Pound) myself.
92 - Rfts is a woman, but she's no lady.
99: Please note that I kindly left that joke for you to make, snark.
OK, good. Now I can revise my estimation in favor of Rush and to the detriment of the women I recommend books to.
56.2: And look! On one side it's Leiter being both a dick to people but probably also on balance more right than wrong. And on the other side it's people disingenuously presenting themselves as standing up for inclusiveness and civility in order to attack him. Yet again! What fun!
Oh, and also people who already have some preexisting grievance (see: "being a dick, Leiter") piling on in silly ways.
I wonder why Leiter thinks the (putative, granted arguendo) fact that "ethical" has no cognitive content means that calling someone unethical can't be defamatory.
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Question for oudemia:
4711 eau de cologne sounds to me like it would be delightful, fresh and clean. I don't have a good place to test it locally. So be honest, would I spell like a grandma?
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My grandmas were excellent spellers.
Based on my anecdata, women who read Ulysses in public are always getting accosted, while men who read Ulysses in public are shunned.
It was one of two books I've read that inspired people to come talk to me about how deep and fantastic it was people used as an excuse to chat me up while I was reading it in public.
My grandma smelled like Estee Lauder.
103: Because then it couldn't be true or false, and hence couldn't be a false claim, which is required for defamation? I have no idea, really.
If that's what he thinks, though, I really hope someone takes him to court over it. That's not because because I think he should get sued or anything, but because I would really, really love to see a court case that required the judge to rule on whether or not "ethical" has cognitive content. Think about what the poor judge would have to read! Think about the effect it would have on the debate if one side could appeal to a judicial decision! I can't see any downside here at all, to me.
No, he was advising someone not to call him "unprofessional", but rather to call him "unethical", since &c. So it wouldn't come up directly, unless the person he was suing claimed that "unprofessional" also lacked cognitive content.
"ethical" has no cognitive content
What on earth would this mean, anyhow?
Cognitive content usually means something like propositional content, or a representation expressible through propositions, or something along those lines. I don't really have any interest in know what Leiter specifically means (there are any number of alternatives), but it could be that "ethical" is just an expression of an emotion (like "ow!" or "RRRAAAAAGGHHH!"), or a prescription (making "this action is ethical" the same as "do this action"), or something along those lines.
So (I assume off the top of my head) if that were true, unprofessional would be something you could argue by appeal to recognized professional norms (see, especially, law), but unethical wouldn't be because it's would be like arguing that someone was saying something false when they said "ow!". And that's impossible since "ow!" doesn't describe a way that the world could be.
god, analytic philosophy is terrible why would that be "cognitive" content?
I would have thought that something's being defamatory would be assessed at least in part according to whether one's fame was deëd, and to assess that one would have to consider whether or not most people think that "ethical" lacks cognitive content (my guess: most people do not think that). Though I suppose that if the truth of an otherwise defamatory statement is a defense, the non-truth-aptness would also be a defense? Maybe? "Sure, what I said about X isn't true, but it doesn't even really make a claim about the world anyway, so …".
Because it's the stuff we use to do cognition? (Allegedly, is disputed, philosophers talk about this, and so on down the list of synonyms possible here.)
I don't know if you could blame this one on analytic philosophy though, since this sort of thing predates it by a fair bit. (Or at least it does to the extent that "analytic philosophy" means the early 1900s stuff that first got the term. If you mean the way the term mostly ends up used today, to mean "philosophy", then yeah ok.)
Calling someone "unethical" can certainly be defamation, if there's a reasonable or accessible set of standards to determine ethical from unethical in context. There are cases and everything.
I once accosted someone in public because he was reading Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand and I had until that very moment believed that no one in all of flyover country besides me had ever even heard of it. I did not chat him up; rather, I babbled unclearly and enthusiastically about the book and had he ever read any other Samuel Delany and if so what did he think about it all? He was nonplussed. But later we stopped being strangers and he moved into my house, where he lives to this very day. It turned out that he hadn't read any other Samuel Delany and I've never really gotten an opinion out of him about Stars In My Pocket, but he pays his rent and has told me shocking things about the interior workings of science fiction fandom.
Because it's the stuff we use to do cognition?
Yeah, that's the part that ain't right.
If you give a science fiction fan a place to sleep...
It's terms of art all the way down!
It's true. We got tired.
104: I love 4711 and wore it in high school. I think it was something of a swinging 60s rocker scent -- Pete Townshend wore it? It's nice. No spelling like a grandma.
122, con't: Caveat! I haven't sniffed it since my high school bottle from the drug store and it may well have been totally reformulated.
I believe the usage goes back to this:
104: I think 4711 is great! My wife and I both wear it, although not at the same time.
As added value, we visited the shop this summer, and what seems like would be kind of a dumb tourist destination (the cologne shop in Cologne) turned out to be great. Vintage ads! Fantastic MCM shop design! A brass faucet endlessly streaming cologne!
Also, it's right near an unbelievable church, Madonna in the Rubble, where a bomb-blasted old church has been incorporated into a Modern chapel, named after the statue found intact in the rubble.
124 to "cognitive content" subthread
Sifu, it's pretty much just the standard Cognitive/Conative/Affective distinction. The relevant part about content is that cognitive states (arguable/supposedly/blahblahblah)* represent the world in a certain way (content => representational content). As a result (of their doing that/of the way they're doing it/etc.)* they can be true or false, and be used to justify the truth of other claims, and so on. Desires (conative) aren't true or false so you can't use a desire to justify some claim about the world. (You can, obviously, use a description of a desire, which might or might not be true, to do that.) You can see a version of this in, say, Hume (where it's really important), but it's pretty standard stuff at this point.
I mean, whether (some kinds of) thinking involves a manipulation of representations of the world in certain ways is a disputed statement, but the overall distinction is pretty standard stuff.
*Philosophy! Land of the impossible to generalize without caveats because everyone disagrees about stuff!
I think the flavor of my objection isn't coming through.
123: They say it's still the same formula. They have made newer products too. Thank you.
The English novel was coded feminine in the age of Defoe? Swift? Fielding? Walter Scott? I'm no expert, but I am skeptical of that assertion.
Walter Scott on Jane Austen:
Also read again, and for the third time at least, Miss Austen's very finely written novel of _Pride and Prejudice_. That young lady had a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life, which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with. The Big Bow-wow strain I can do myself like any now going; but the exquisite touch, which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting, from the truth of the description and the sentiment, is denied to me. What a pity such a gifted creature died so early!
And yes, the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century English novel was definitely coded feminine, seen as a feminine genre.
And 25 really speaks to me, because I loved The Corrections too, even though its author is obviously a major d*ck. I think Halford nails it in 47.
I was told 88% by someone at Hachette a few years ago, when I asked.
That was just their polite way of declining to buy the rights to a novel about a crossfit trained supervillain who sends out a team of bikini clad bodyguards to hunt down bread-eaters for sport and meals.
130 &pf:
Many men today are said to report female majorities in groups with 20%, 30% women; earlier centuries were even poutier. Which leads to boy flight & the DC reboot, eventually.
88% for litfic makes me wonder what the breakdown for other genres is. Also, do men read more romance ebooks because the Cover Problem is gone?
This thread also reminds me:
1. I've been meaning to read The Secret History of Domesticity but it's really long and I'm no longer an academic. And I haven't read many English novels.
2. In college one of the philosophy classes I took was basically a survey of a few topics from Descartes to Hume. I was really struggling to come up with a paper topic and I went to my TA's office hours and one of the things he suggested was I could write about something related to cognition and Locke and maybe Sapir-Whorf was in there somewhere. I thought, not only haven't we covered anything along these lines except reading one text by Locke, but I would probably end up making a bunch of unsupported claims about other fields of research if I headed down that path.
I ended up writing something about Locke, I think, but I don't remember what it was. It was pretty much purely an analysis of arguments and stayed away from making any claims about cognition.
Is "unethical" defamatory?
Yes. It's a damaging statement. Unethical, in common parlance, means that your behaviour isn't according to a code of ethics, just as 'criminal' means that your behaviour breaks explicit laws. These codes of ethics in many cases (medical ethics, academic ethics etc) exist objectively, just like the Highway Code; you can look them up online and everything. So it's a statement that can be objectively true. If I say "nosflow is unethical" it's legitimate for you to ask "what's he done that's unethical?" and expect a factual answer.
Frankly it doesn't matter, really, whether some philosopher thinks that "ethical" has no cognitive content unless that philosopher is the only audience for the statement. Conversely, if I were to say "nosflow is a coracle-snuggler" it would not be defamatory, unless it were made to an audience which understood what coracle-snuggling was, and believed it to be evidence of moral turpitude. Or if I were to insult nosflow in an invented language, it would not be defamatory as long as no one who knew the language heard the statement.
133: By "DC reboot" do you mean the New 52? Were they losing male readers before that?
I suspect scifi and fantasy readers are now majority women, and recent political fights are in response to the shift.
I suspect scifi and fantasy readers are now majority women, and recent political fights are in response to the shift.
Best guess (based on a bit of googling around) is that it's pretty much 50-50 - slightly more men than women read SF (55% of SF readers are male), and slightly more women than men read fantasy. That mirrors the spread of writers - Locus reports that 54% of the books it receives for review are by men, 43% by women, and the rest are either joint-authored or by entities of unknown sex.
I believe Leiter "unethical" shtick was an attempt to be funny.
136.1: AFAIK they'd gained some female ones. Before.
136.2, if ajay is right, is illustrative : maybe-50% feels like a majority. I don't know if there's any room between sparse presence by a marked group, which is denied to its face & forgotten repeatedly, and a presence not-sparse enough to cause those political fights.
