You Can Only Kill the Author....a LITTLE

I'm going to be babysitting comments for most of the day over on Writing About Writing's Facebook Page, because this post will probably bring out the more than a few trolls. 

So instead of a regular post today, I'm going to repeat what I said there.

Okay, folks....

First a reminder: if you can't disagree quietly and scroll on by, find and read the commenting guidelines unless you want to be getting your "You should be writing" memes from somewhere else by this time tomorrow. [This isn't exactly applicable to blog comments, but I do moderate them.]

Secondly, while there seems to be some discourse going on about how far Death of an Author can extend, the voices that we should be listening to (the folks harmed––namely the trans community) are generally not okay with such a flippant dismissal of authorial harm (in this case Rowling's transphobia), so it's important to understand who you're hurting and erasing, even when such things are said in jest.

While I understand the discussion continues, and I've no place getting involved in it directly myself (strictly speaking, I'm not cisgender, but I'm also not trans), I also did not want my taking a seat and listening to begin to stretch my silence into the "conspicuous" length on a platform like Writing About Writing.

My experience has ever been that the separation of art and artist is and has always been an intensely personal decision. Inspiring problematic artists have always existed, and as much as we want to, we can neither undo someone's harm nor reach back into our childhoods or young adulthoods (or even last week) and make certain media be NOT formative to who we are. However, I have always always ALWAYS taken the position that it is important to understand these things and listen to others. That an artist means a lot to one person never means they are exculpated from their hurtful behaviors to another, and whether you consider it an important part of the post-structural analysis of a good little writer or you just want to make sure you're not being a willfully oblivious asshole, understanding that art and artist can NEVER be vacuum-sealed away from each other is vital to one's relationship to either–-and to one's own work (because your bullshit is going to come up in your work too, so you better unpack it).

The post I've seen going around most lauded by the trans community is either THIS POST or a truncated version of it on FB shared by Sophie Labelle. It will sting if you love Harry Potter, but I think it's important for any person who reads extensively (and CERTAINLY any writer) to keep these things in mind. Don't make heroes of artists. Authors, and all artists, are human and most are deeply flawed. 

Please read it with an open mind.

And in case it somehow didn't go without saying, trans women are women, trans men are men, and J.K. Rowling is a writer, and so will be able to obfuscate her bigotry behind a lot of floccose language, but the fact remains that beyond her gossamer words, she is a transphobe.

Guy Goodman Reviews Beowulf (Revision)

I said the HUMAN condition,
not the dragon condition.

[Part of our ongoing clean up of old articles.]

Why the earliest known work of Anglo-Saxon fiction got English literature off to a speculative start.

Good evening. I'm Guy Goodman St.White, your very British-sounding host.

Tonight we shall discuss the fountainhead of all English literature: Beowulf. While we will be delving back through Western Canon into the classics and other translated texts that have influenced English literature, I will, rightly, spend most of my time analyzing dead white guys.

Let us set the stage for this exploration by discussing the first known work of English literature. We can return to some other seminal Western literature works over time.

 Long told as oral tradition by the Anglo Saxon scops of Scandinavia, it was finally transcribed only after Christianity brought letters to the illiterate heathens. However, we do not know exactly who transcribed it, and we call this person only The Beowulf Poet. Like the Bible itself, Beowulf has tensions between Christian values and the value systems of the cultures that transmitted it orally (Anglo Saxon in this case), which lead often to a strange mix of conflicting messages. Beowulf sometimes extols forgiveness and sometimes retribution.

As the fountainhead of all writing ever done in English, Beowulf--in many ways--explains and sets the stage for all that will come after it. In a fundamental way it is no surprise that English speakers are so attracted to the drivel of speculative fiction; their very first story is a prime example of absolute tripe. Probably the plebs enjoy their unrealistic speculative twaddle principally due to the influence of The Beowulf Poet and his ilk. What can we really expect when this is what we have to work with as literally the first book in English. If the foundation of English literature had been set in a seedy rehab facility and the antagonists had been people's preconceptions about bisexuality, the entire English speaking world might have a sliver or two of taste and sophistication.

X-men: First First First First Class.

Beowulf performs acts quite simply impossible to mortal men, like swimming underwater for hours or engaging in combat for absurd lengths of time. This is to say nothing of his nemeses, a cadre of increasingly unrealistic monsters right out of the pages of a Stephen King horrorbook. What we have here is nothing more than a hackneyed example of speculative fiction that The Beowulf Poet tried to make "edgy" by splicing together horror and superhero genres. Not only is Beowulf genre crap, but if anything, Beowulf is extra genre with genre sauce. Realism is not on its list of virtues, and therefore it has simply nothing to inform us about humanity.

Fortunately these days we recognize this sort of malarkey for what it is; and no one who appreciates real literature would be caught dead reading Pennywise the Dancing Clown vs. The X Men. No wonder the world of words is in such a deplorable state.

Seamus Heaney: In Memorium

There's a pretty good chance if you're not into poetry, and not from the United Kingdom, that you may not have heard of Seamus Heaney.  But he's arguably the best Irish poet ever to live, and one of the best poets.  He earned a closet full of awards including a Nobel Prize in Literature and The Golden Wreath.

Heaney passed away on August 30th.

I wrote a paper on him for my Junior Seminar for which my professor said I was doing master's level analysis, but, honestly, the depth and complexity of his poetry made such analysis easy.

He is one of the few poets in existence whose skill and passion made poetry pay the bills. Over 2/3 of every living poet's collection in the U.K. was a Seamus Heaney book.

The world of words is diminished.

The Best Stand Alone Science Fiction Novel

The Results Are In--Read your messianic literature right away.  Because we can give a pass to the first and best "What-you-folks-need-is-a-honkey!" science fiction story.

I shed a single dramatic tear at how few votes there were.   It was a manly Aragorn-Loves-Boromir's-Dying-Speech tear, not a Dawson's Creek tear.  I just want to be clear about that.  Also, that was dust in the air at the end of The Iron Giant.  DUST!  (Both times.)

But, I'm just going to keep doing what I'm doing whether it's for forty people or forty thousand.  Maybe some day we'll redo the whole poll to get a better sample size.

Dune kicked total ass, followed by Neuromancer.  Then there four way tie for third between LeGuin and three really classic classics.

I can't be too sad though.  Dune is pretty damned awesome.

Oh and the person who nominated Flowers For Algernon is on my Spock-Eyebrow-Arch list.  If you nominate a book as "the best science fiction novel," I sort of expect that it will at least get your vote on the poll.  You know who you are.  I'm watching you buddy!

Oh and here, if you seriously haven't read these books you should, and if you buy shit from me, I get a couple of cents.  I picked the cheapest ones I could find--which means in good conscience, I have to let you know that the really old books (Frankenstein, The Time Machine) are off copyright and easy to find for free:

Shakespeare's Sonnet 23--My Forbidden Love

Not YOU!
All you did was write it.

Unsupportive Girlfriend gets really jealous when I talk about Shakespeare's Sonnet 23.  She says, "You care more about that damned poem than you do me!"

This is, of course, absolutely and patently ridiculous.  It doesn't even make sense, honestly.  How she can come to such an unreasonable conclusion is totally beyond me.

I make sure to take extreme pains to take both of them out to lunch the same amount of times, and I'm very careful to get them both gifts at the same time. When I bought 23 a white Akoya pearl necklace, I made sure to also buy unsupportive girlfriend several pairs of kooky knee-socks. Granted I had that one picnic with 23 out in the park where I made my famous tuna salad and we walked the lake as the sun set, but Unsupportive Girlfriend doesn't like those things anyway.  At least I think she doesn't.

I mean, sure, there was that incident last year.  And that was my bad...I admit it.  No matter how many times I tried to explain that 23 and me are just really good friends, she wasn't buying it.  Then she looked at me and said, "if you can look me straight in the eye and swear to me that you don't love 23 more than me, I'll never say another word." Well....I kind of flubbed and said something about "different love" and "kinds of affection."  It was probably not the best thing I could have said under the circumstances, but that was seriously like seven months ago.

Now every time I take 23 to dinner and a movie unsupportive girlfriend turns into a dreadful harpy about the whole thing.  "You're taking 23 to I-Sushi, huh?  You only took me to IHOP."

Seriously?  You want to keep score about that?  IHOP makes great eggs and really great coffee!

Don't worry about her, my love.
She just gets upset since she and I don't have the same connection.

As an unperfect actor on the stage
Who with his fear is put besides his part,
Or some fierce thing replete with too much rage,
Whose strength's abundance weakens his own heart.
So I, for fear of trust, forget to say
The perfect ceremony of love's rite,
And in mine own love's strength seem to decay,
O'ercharged with burden of mine own love's might.
O, let my books be then the eloquence
And dumb presagers of my speaking breast,
Who plead for love and look for recompense
More than that tongue that more hath more express'd.
   O, learn to read what silent love hath writ:
   To hear with eyes belongs to love's fine wit.


I am a writer.  I have a dumpy writer's body, and on the best of days I'm wearing clothes that don't match and only sort of fit.  I would much rather talk about how vampires have changed as a monster over the decades and why Hawthorne gets a bad rap for being dry when he was off the HOOK with all the messed up shit going on in his writing than I would enjoy getting drunk and having dick measuring contests about whose job sucks more. I watch alpha dogs (not always just alpha males) work their mac daddy mojo on the world and everyone in it while I can't seem to quite care quite enough to do anything but be immolated with envy when they get what I want (not always just teh hotties).  People with great fashion, great cars, great pecs, and great extroversion leave me choking on their dust, and while I don't care quite enough to shuffle my priorities away from writing, reading, writing, being a geek, writing, cheese, writing, video games, and writing, I also don't not care enough to not feel a pang.

So that's why some days I love this fucking sonnet so hard.  I can't imagine my life without it.  I bought it a diamond ring, and I'm going to ask it to spend the rest of our days together.  I know I should probably check with Unsupportive Girlfriend before I do, but she'll probably just find some way to blow the whole thing out of proportion somehow.