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.

The Mailbox: Good Books and Racists

Will going through traditional-publishing help your book be higher quality? Was Kipling a racist?

[Remember, keep sending in your questions to chris.brecheen@gmail.com with the subject line "W.A.W. Mailbox" and I will answer each Friday.  I will use your first name ONLY unless you tell me explicitly that you'd like me to use your full name or you would prefer to remain anonymous.  My comment policy also may mean one of your comments ends up in the mailbox. .] 

Samantha asks:

I've read in a like four different places that one of the benefits of traditional publishing is that your work will be scrutinized backwards and forwards. Given some of the crap that gets self-published, maybe that's not such a bad idea. Even the five star books are crap–it's just the writer's friends doing a bunch of fake reviews. I want the book I put out to be good, so maybe traditional publishing is better, no? What do you think?

If you want to write a better book Samantha, no one is stopping you. It's not like when you go to submit self-published books the Microsoft Paperclip comes up and says, "It looks like you're trying to self-publish a novel. Would you like to add some horrible grammar mistakes," or an error message that says "We have detected that this is your eighth draft of My Greatamerican Novel. Please revert to your first draft before publishing."

The only thing stopping most people from writing a better book is their egotacular sense that they are already fucking perfect or their pants-wetting impatience to be published before they're ready.

Can I just pause for a second and say that I'm glad to be off the hate mail barrage of Blogust. I know it gets a lot of traffic, but what usually happens is that the hate mail is about me, and I'd much rather answer questions about writing.  I am not so choleric when I'm not returning fire. So thank you for having a question about writing.

I'm out of traditional publishing for my own reasons, but for others there are pros and cons for both. However, the ability of the traditional publishing to put out better quality work is a bit of an "ad hoc ergo proctor hoc" fallacy. There are reasons to do traditional publishing, but this one is pretext.

Because of the cost of printing, writing has often had a strange seat among art and entertainment. Most arts there are expressions for amateurs, semi-professionals, professionals, and the extremely successful. Community playhouses, local theater, troupes, and Broadway all have different levels of skill and talent even if everyone is serious about their craft. You can easily be known as a local painter and even scrape out a living without the slightest world renown. Musicians can get gigs and get paid in local bars, small venues, and big regional venues long before they do album tours or have a fan from the other side of the country. Only writing has seemed to have a dichotomy where the artist is either published or not. (Of course, the reality is that there are small presses–most operating locally–but the perception of publication as that rubicon of quality is undeniable.)

The sense of this dichotomy has persisted even after printing costs dropped in the sixties, seventies, and especially eighties making smaller and smaller print runs possible–thus less and less financial risk. Even as the dichotomy became more and more of a continuum.

What computers have done is to restore writing as an art form with a full continuum of quality much like music experienced a decade ago. Now everyone can put their work out there and hoof it to promote themselves. Yes, that means that not everyone is spectacular (I'm sure not!) but even mediocre writers can carve out a niche with some fans and do their thing. Bloggers exist from the amateur making the price of a movie once a year to the slick famous writers pulling down six figures. Writing has become more like the other art forms where you can still perform in front of an audience and make a pittance while you improve your skills.

Does that mean there are some crummy books out there. It surely does. But anyone who reads a lot already knows there are some pretty shitty published books out there complete with typos and missing punctuation and everything. While traditionally published books tend to be a little better, there is no guarantee. I remember my friend Jason and I used to pick up a dollar's worth of the worst looking books we could find from the 5¢ table at the used book store and see who could find the one that was the worst.

Loser had to buy the winner a Super Big Gulp and four games of Ninja Gaiden.

(By the way, I can't think of any customer generated rating system that isn't notoriously "ballot stuffed" by friends and family [or hired shills for bigger stuff] of the creators. It's not just Amazon or Goodreads book reviews. I find ignoring the stars and reading the non-hyperbolic reviews is usually most informative about the actual product.)

If you want to write a good book, write a good book. There's nothing stoping you but your own impatience or hubris. Put it through multiple revisions. Have it professionally content edited. Hire a copy editor who makes three figures an hour to comb through it for the typos you missed (instead of your friend who's an English major). Get lots of feedback from many different people who read a lot (and then take it to heart.) Go medieval on its ass.

Because here's the truth and there's no way of getting around it; you would have to do all that revision anyway. There's a myth that publishers will assign your recently shat out word babies an editor and it basically isn't true until/unless you are already established author (and even then it's not like they do it out of generosity–their cost will be folded into your contract negotiations). You'll have a copy editor look over the galley proofs with a fine-toothed comb, but that's only after you've gotten through all the layers of rejection.

If you don't hand them a cleaned up, multi-drafted work, they won't say "Let's clean this up because fuck; I just know there's genius under all these layers of missing commas and wrong homophones!" They will just say "This shit is the shittiest shit on shit street in Shitsville."

See that's where perception and reality diverge, Samantha, and why we have that sense of a book as either being "Worth Publishing™" or not (instead of a continuum like other arts). The publisher isn't working with you to help you create that better book. They just approve it or don't. It's more like gate keepers act as a hazing process.

Books that come out the far end of this process tend to be better quality not because of anything the publisher did, but because each time they were rejected, the writer went back and worked harder to improve the work. (Books right on the edge of possibility sometimes get a few thoughtful suggestions from a publisher or agent and encouragement to resubmit a later draft, but most just get a form letter. "No. Fuck you. Your book sucks. Go away.") The writer is still the one doing all the revision and hiring editors and doing all that work.

The problem is that non-traditional publishing lets a writer bypass that rejection and go for the instant gratification. Who wouldn't want to just push a button and skip all that fucking self doubt and work? Well, if it turns out if you want to be a good self-published writer, you have to resist that temptation and haze yourself. Unless you have deplorable impulse control (by the way, no one who sits down and writes a freaking novel has deplorable impulse control), nothing is stopping you from producing work of higher quality.

But it's not the publisher making your book be better. It's like those kids stories where the power was inside the character all along. Except...like....with writing and shit.

Eli writes:

My friend keeps claiming Rudyard Kipling was racist. Can you set him straight.

My reply:

I'm afraid not, Eli. He's been dead a long time. I'm not sure anyone could set him straight even when he was alive. He seemed pretty strident in his assumptions about....

Oh you probably meant set your friend straight, huh? Okay.

Yes I can see how that would be an easy mistake to make, what with Kipling writing White Man's Burden and all. Plus the vast collection of work he did portraying other cultures that are so infamously ethnocentric they have actually lead Edward Said to the genesis of an entire school of literary criticism which could essentially be called EuroAmericans Are TOTES FUCKING Racist. Even though Just So Stories are quite literally the introductory go to example for post colonial theory of sneering imperialism, I'm sure it's just a big misunderstanding. The fact that Jungle Book is an allegory for Britian's incursion into India that literally uses humans staring down animals and cowing them with their civilizedness, and at one point a British railway builder shooting a crocodile into three pieces with an elephant gun is, I'm sure, just coincidence.

Of course he's racist, Eli. Kipling's writing is basically the quintessential example of how racism can be unconsciously condescending and not necessarily hate-filled. The best thing we can say about him is that back in Kipling's day they may not have called it racism. They just thought it was pretty self evident that white people totes fucking ruled and that they had a duty to teach backward people how to live their lives properly. Even as he satirized U.S. imperialism in the Philippines, his larger body of works pretty obviously indicates that he really did feel it was Europe's duty to show everyone else how to live and lift them out of poverty and ignorance.

He might not be racist in the "Get away from me you dirty savages!" way that many people of his time were, but rather in the ethnocentric way that doles out value judgements on another culture through the lens of one's own. (This is why modern anti-racist movements literally talk about "decolonizing" your thoughts/words/behaviors/government/economics.)

Just because there's a gap between white supremacists burning crosses on lawns and well meaning but clueless folks telling people of color how they ought to live does not make the latter un-racist. It's just racist in a slightly more invisible way. (Although it is largely only "slightly more invisible" to white people).

In fact, most white people (or folks with internalized colonial attitudes) still haven't learned this lesson today. You can look around and see how the way non-white cultures dress or the type of music they like used as justification basically for killing them. The entire justification of right wing fiscal policy has ideas baked into it like: "Those people just want to live off government handouts." And liberal areas have their versions as well––a more refined sense of what SORTS of people belong in the neighborhood. All of this often said by folks who think they can't possibly be racist because they haven't committed any hate crimes.

Culturally we falling into the trap of realizing that racism is bad, but not knowing what racism IS.

Kipling's attitudes may have been a sign of the times, and Kipling may have been more open minded than some of his fellow countrymen, but he's pretty patronizing and judgmental and ethnocentric and imperialist and yes, racist.

I'm afraid you owe your friend a Super Big Gulp and four games of Ninja Gaiden.

Guy Goodman St.White Reviews George Orwell: Genre Hack (1984 and Animal Farm)

Would have been brilliant.
Except for all the fucking talking ANIMALS in it.
Genre crap.

Good evening,

Guy Goodman St.White here.  I'm your utterly British sounding host and this evening we'll be reviewing George Orwell.  What, you say?  I've been going roughly in order and George Orwell skips from Shakespeare's contemporaries straight into the mid 20th century, if you hadn't already noticed that is a half empty bottle of Jack Daniels sitting on my desk, so my preoccupation with reviewing the cannon in the proper order is somewhat...relaxed this evening.  I apologize to those of you who have become accustomed to my fastidious professionalism, but I'm still coping with the fact that this is the kind of a job where I might have to fight off dimensional invaders or lose colleagues to rogue generals. Let's just say this job is definitely not worth eleven-five a year.

That's eleven dollars and five cents in case you're unaware of the budgetary constraints here at Writing About Writing.  Ever since Chris blew fifty trillion dollars on research and development trying to get bacon to come through the internet, the budget around here has been a little shoestring.

But let's not get distracted.

Orwell: Total Hack

Orwell's two most well-known books--indeed the only two books of the nine he wrote of which most people are aware--are 1984 and Animal Farm.  An interesting factoid, which most plebs like to accumulate like brain detritus, is that these two books are the best selling pair of books of any 20th century author.  Other books did better, but no single author wrote TWO books that did as well.  Stephen King will have to just stick it in his ear.  (And the collected hackworks of J.K. Rowling and Dan Brown straddled the 20th/21st century divide.) That makes this author unquestionably one of the best selling of the 20th century.

Of course the taste of the plebs is, as ever, no more than an example of what real literature isn't.  You show me a book with the slightest bit of commercial appeal, and I'll show you a book that bloviates with sub-optimal prose skill, and Orwell the sellout is no exception.  The speculative drips from Orwell's sophist offerings to the written word in what one can only assume is a deliberate attempt to write the worst examples of genre tripe in the 20th century.  And Orwell just happens to be awful enough to pull it off.  One of these books is no more than rank science fiction and the other some bent piece of magical realism.  My two year old also has a book with magical talking animals in it.  Neither of Orwell's novels are worthy of any literary attention due to their total lack of realism.  If Animal Farm had been a seedy portrayal of the actual Russian Revolution with actual people instead of some wannabe side story in the Chronicles of Narnia, it might have been truly literary--and interesting to far fewer people.....which means it's good.  Throw in some same sex relationships and a couple of unaccepting parents, and Orwell could have been one of the greats.

And if 1984 had been.....well, there's really no way to salvage that steaming pile of speculative flotsam. Setting a story in the future means it is automatically not literature.  Ever.  Or didn't George get the memo?

I'm not exactly sure how Orwell thought he could portray the human condition when he was writing about animals (who somehow manage to engage in agriculture without prehensile thumbs).  I mean...the human condition is human, right?  It's not called the farm animal condition.   Clearly both this linguistic "shart" (as you yanks say) and the exploits of Winston Smith, frolicking about in a not-even-remotely accurate prediction a dystopian future, can't even come close to real literature.  They are no more than trite examples of genre work that offer nothing in the way of quality character development or compelling themes.

13 o'clock?  Bah!  That's not literature.

So please join us next month for our next installment of "Speculative Fiction Sucks Balls--And Not in the Good Way."  I'm Guy Goodman St.White.  Good-night.



P.S.- Chris has insisted I begin to sell out in my reviews.  Even though you could get both of these books at any used book stores for probably about a dollar, if you want a shiny, new, overpriced copy delivered right to your door, you can get them here.



    

A Few Concluding Thoughts About The Western Canon

Pictured: all the translated books in the canon that are speculative fiction.
Good riddance!

Good evening.  I'm Guy Goodman St.White your bloody British sounding host, and tonight, I want to do something a little different.  We're saying farewell to the translated works of the Western Canon to focus exclusively on important British literature and eventually even some of that Yank stuff.  However, I thought a few parting thoughts on the non-English Western Canon might be in order.

Oh who am I kidding? Chris keeps coming in here and changing his mind about whether I should do a segment praising Cervantes for his ruthless dedication to expunging speculative elements or if I should just take the whole day off.  The worst part is, he keeps changing his clothes back and forth and acting like he didn't say the last thing and has no knowledge of what he said while wearing the other outfit.  He's pretending that there's two of him--as if that isn't the most overdone cliche in all of literature!

Anyway, finally he said something about just doing whatever the hell I wanted and he couldn't go on living in the shadow and something like "that guy has everything that's mine."  By that point, he'd wasted enough of my time that a thoughtful review was out of the question.  Thus, I am simply going to  say a few last words about the translated Canon of Western literature.

I've done a review of Beowulf, Judith, The Iliad, The Odyssey (with Lady Felicity's help), Plato, and The Divine Comedy.  Frankly even if I hadn't been downsized from a segment a week to this...once a month shenanigans, I could do this for years.  There is simply so much speculative tripe in the canon that at some point, it becomes an exercise in simple recognition.  Gods, ghosts, magic, demons, the afterlife, talking animals, fairies, dragons, minotaurs, Fenris, Medusa, Grendel and more.  There is high fantasy, low fantasy, utopian fiction, distopian fiction, and even conjecture about the future that would easily be considered science fiction by today's parlance.  For all the praise the canon gets, it is akin to an all-you-can-eat buffet of unrealism and the readers of the world brought their extra stretchy pants.  As if any of these hacks could say something meaningful about the human condition so far divorced from the gritty truth that marks real literature.

However, with all that said, it was never my intention to point out every failed attempt at true writing the canon has to offer.  I picked a few of the most well known pieces of flotsam with some of the most dramatic examples of speculative excreta.  At this point you have certainly gotten the point that the canon is filled with the kind of fiction that every real literary connoisseur knows is simply bad writing.  We shall now turn our attention fully to works done in English.  And believe me, there are many.  Resting like it does, on a bedrock of unrealistic precedent, English literature delves time and again into failed attempts at being meaningful or poignant by succumbing to the siren song of speculative tripe.

So please join me next month when we stop reading the works of less civilized cultures, and start reading exclusively English canon works.  All on the next episode of Speculative Fiction Sucks Balls--and Not in the Good Way.  I'm Guy Goodman St.White.  Good night.

Guy Goodman St.White Reviews Spencer's The Fairy Queen--Genre Crap Simply For The Sake of Genre

Good evening, I'm Guy Goodman St.White your outrageously British sounding host, and tonight we will be taking a glimpse at Sir Edmund Spencer's The Fairy Queen.  We are entering a period of history within our exploration of the important British part of the canon where there are a number of quite spectacular authors of incredible skill and literary prowess who nonetheless decide to delve into the dregs of speculative fiction for some ungodly reason.  Maybe they just liked having unrealistic works that couldn't possibly reflect the human condition.

Maybe it was all that opium they were bringing in from India.  I don't purport to comprehend.

Ranked highest among these wayward genre writers is Sir Edmund Spenser.  Despite Samuel Johnson's disdain for it, Spencer really should have stuck to the gritty realism of his pastoral poetry, with its banal depictions of cleaning stalls and husbandry, but instead he succumbed to the methane fumes and decided to write one of the most blatantly genre pieces in all of English literature.  Spencer quite literally sets out to create a transparent allegory about Queen Elizabeth and England.  And let me tell you without any equivocation, he succeeds magnificently in his quest to create really-genre genre writing.  If I were one of these young online hooligans, I might refer to it as ubergenre.  High fantasy, speculative offal oozes off of every page in an affront to everything for which good literature stands.

I was very excited when I picked this up.  I thought it was going to be about a gay cross dresser whose parents did not understand his lifestyle choices.  You know...the stuff of REAL literature.  Instead there were knights and satyrs and magicians and not literary fairies that reflect the human condition, but the stupid folklore kind with their bollix wings and shit, and the whole thing was just a train wreck of one cliche image after another, excused by Spencer's rationalization that they were symbolic.

In a plot that would make the makers of the Warcraft saga say "Damn, this is convoluted!" Spencer literally DE-banals England's political situation with every work of genre fiction he can muster. From the first canto of the first book to the seventh canto of the third book, The Fairy Queen is a non-stop barrage of unrealistic, high fantasy imagery taking the idea of being genre simply for its own sake to the meta level. Honestly, where is the black death, the dysentery, the ravaging of heathen women, the armor chafing so bad that it smells like spoiled chicken, and of course the homoerotic subtext. That is the stuff of REAL stories of medieval knights? This genre bilge knows nothing of the human condition.

The canon for some horrid reason is filled with speculative fiction tripe, but none is quite so guilty of going down the genre rabbit hole as The Fairy Queen, and bloody Edmund Spencer with his bloody knighthood.  So I'm going to have a brandy or six while I think about how so much of this unrealistic bilge somehow became important to read even to a vaunted ideologue like Harold Bloom (peace be upon him).  Please join me next month for another episode of Speculative Fiction Sucks Balls (And Not In the Good Way).  I'm Guy Goodman St.White.  Not SIR Guy Goodman St.White, you'll notice, but just the regular kind who knows good literature when he sees it and bosh when he sees that.  Regardless...good evening.

Guy Goodman St.White Reviews The Divine Comedy--More Genre Nonsense

Good Evening.  Guy Goodman St.White here, and I'll be your exceedingly British-accented host.  I do want to apologize for that little tantrum I threw last month.  I may seem to be completely poised most of the time, but sometimes I go back to my primate origins and I simply want to fling my feces at terrible writing and howl.  How can I seriously be the only one who understands what actual good writing is?  I guess here in the Ivory Tower we just know what everyone ought to like, even though they don't. Some days it's just so difficult to wake up in the morning and face the cold, hard truth about just how much speculative fiction makes up the canon, and how well-intentioned, but ultimately ignorant, troglodyte plebs actually feel that much of this speculative tripe is literature.

You know what REALLY involves speculation?
What happens after we die, that's what.

Case in point, the works of Dante Alighieri are largely considered to be one of the greatest works of world literature and Italy's preeminent work.  This is of course, the opinion only of those who tolerate protagonists running around in perhaps the most unrealistic setting an author could possibly write: the afterlife.

You would think 12 century Italy didn't have any seedy buildings which Dante could have grounded an actual meaningful work of realism.  Surely in Italy of all places there are stories of sexuality in question and intolerant parents! Instead, since he couldn't be arsed with a genuine exploration of realism, he insisted upon clinging to the most unrealistic journey he could conceive of.  Literally.

Though Dante's Inferno is the most oft cited, referenced, and read of his works, it really comprises only 1/3 the work.  Each of three canticas (each with 33 cantos) describe a different part of the afterlife--hell,  purgatory, and paradise in true genre style.  He has dead poets as guides, meets people long dead, presumes to know who's going to hell (a list which seems intended chiefly to offend everyone ever), and basically stumbles around in a Thomas Aquinas theological infomercial.  The whole thing is supposed to be some allegory for approaching God--as if that's a theme for real literature.

Genre crap drips off of every one of the 14,233 lines of this abomination to real literature.  Honestly folks, there isn't much further you can get away from the human condition.  If this had been about death itself, we might have had something to work with, but it's about what happens after that...which is as far from human experience as a setting can really get.

I mean that in absolutely the most literal sense and not as hyperbole.  This journey of religious wish-fulfillment high fantasy into a place no one has ever been or ever will be, meeting people no one has met or ever will meet again, and doing things no one has ever done (and we only pause from saying "or ever will do" because of the death threats) is as divorced from realism as is possible to write about.  Apparently Italy's preeminent literary author can't even figure out that realism is what makes for real literature.  So instead we end up with preeminent Italian speculative crap that is actually so damned unrealistic that it makes me yearn for the gritty settings of an elven castle or an intergalactic cruiser to get the taste out of my mouth.

Plus....it's not even that funny!  You would think any "comedy" worthy of the label "divine" would have a FEW more humorous bits.

And people think this Dante hack could write.  That's the real travesty of this whole thing.  It's a good thing I'm so damned educated and I can tell you all why you're so wrong to enjoy speculative fiction.  It's a very, very good thing indeed.

Again, I'm Guy Goodman St.White, and thank you for joining me here on Writing About Writing.  Please join me next month for another segment of Speculative Fiction Sucks Balls: And Not In the Good Way.  Good night.

Guy Goodman St.White "Reviews" Utopia

[Writing About Writing's senior editor and writer, Chris Brecheen, here.  When I noticed Guy White--that's my little nickname for him--was running late on today's segment, went down to the Masterpiece Theater-esque set to see what was taking him so long, and I found this letter, which I will now post in lieu of his regular content.  Apologies for the inconvenience.]

Dear Chris (and the rest of the staff at W.A.W.),

My sincerest apologies for my unannounced absence.  I simply couldn't gird my intestinal fortitude to both sound terribly British and do today's review of Thomas More's Utopia.  It was bad enough when you downsized me to one guest blogging segment a month, and when you decided to hire one of those genocidal cephalopods as our office assistant (I don't care how good it is at filing), but to suggest that I review Utopia?  That was the last straw!

Seriously?  I mean...SERIOUSLY??  I know More had predecessors, notably Plato, who liked to discuss political issues by the use of hypothetical Utopias, and so utopian fiction has a long and illustrious tradition in the Western tradition, but you can't get much more blatantly unrealistic and speculative than a magical happy island that never really existed where everyone lives in twenty person communes and has two slaves each.  (I'm guessing it's not exactly a utopia to THEM, by the way.)  Utopian fiction is one of the halmarks of science fiction, and as such isn't, can't be, and never will be real literature due to it's lack of realism.  If More's new world had some gritty native mixed marriages (preferably of same sex couples) and a slew of "old world" parents who didn't approve, this could possibly be realistic enough to at least warrant my attention, but...I can't...

I can't even believe you thought that anything so completely speculative came anywhere close to being actually real literature.   That's just the dregs of speculative dreggery right there.  I have come absolutely unhinged at the very concept of how speculative (and thus non-literary) the entire Western "canon"--and I use that word lightly, Harold Bloom--seems to be.  I just need some time to think.  I'm going home for a few weeks.  I shall return next month.  Hopefully by that time, you will have seen reason about having a spy squid for a secretary, and about the benefit of being at least a little realistic.

It's enough to make someone thing that you might not take my guest blogging segment entirely seriously, and I need a moment to consider the implications of that.

Yours in literary pursuits,

Guy Goodman St.White

Guy Goodman St.White Discusses Plato--Genre Hack

Good evening.  I'm Guy Goodman St.White, your quite British sounding host, and this evening I would like to take a moment to discuss a rather prolific author instead of a single work.  That author would be Plato.  Along with his mentor Socrates and his student Aristotle, Plato laid much of the Western tradition for philosophical and scientific thought.  He is perhaps most well known for the allegory of the cave and his theory of perfect forms.  We can probably also blame him for twenty-four hundred years of people who think "I believe X" somehow makes it true.

Whatever grudging nod we must give Plato for his work laying the bedrock of Western philosophy, it is eviscerated, however, if we observe him through a literary lens, for he insisted on being a prolific speculative fiction author.  Every time those Greeks turned around, Plato was scratching out some new manuscript that embraced a total lack of realism.   Honestly it give us pause to wonder if something wasn't very wrong with Plato that he couldn't keep his head out of the clouds of his own rampant imagination.  What he needed to do was stop visiting the world of make believe so often where he wrote down all that speculative stuff, and focus his attention and due diligence on creating philosophical thought.  Certainly it is not as if the two are related or anything.  He easily could have given us more philosophy if he'd stopped devoting significant measures of his time to such tomfoolery.  

Instead we are subjected to his nonstop deluge of genre.  Plato delights in writing alternative histories where he portrays conversations with Socrates that never actually occurred.  Such debased lack of realism might be forgivable if he placed the historical character into gritty and banal situations of deep characterization with which to explore the human condition and the "greekness" of their love, but instead--in a profound example of everything that is wrong with alternative histories--he uses the interaction only to explore the philosophical and social issues of the time...and get preachy about them.  

Were this the extent of Plato's dabbling into speculative fiction, we could almost forgive him his trespasses, but he insisted on also penning Utopian fiction.  Perhaps the best well known of these is The Republic, in which Plato goes on at length about his perfect wonderful island that doesn't exist.  And of course, a less well known work of Plato, Timaeus, is where we see the first sighting of one of, if not THE, most recognizable and oft-recurring single element in speculative fiction's absurdly unrealistic portrayal of Earth, Atlantis.  Oh yes.  You can blame Plato for every terrible Atlantis movie you've ever seen, for this ridiculous glob of drivel, from which thousands of horrible speculative fiction works have spawned, was his brain child.

I told you western philosophy wasn't worth it in the final analysis.

So thank you very much Plato for all your ideas about morality and politics, but we'd just as soon you didn't come back to the cave if all you were ever going to rattle our chains with was your new sci-fi paperback about magical-land.

Guy Goodman St.White Reviews Sir Gawain and The Green Knight--More Hack Genre Nonsense

In "real literature," decapitation is an auto-loss
for any contest in which one is involved. 

Good Afternoon.  Guy Goodman St.White here, your absurdly British sounding host.  Many of you may not remember me since I was recently relegated from my weekly spot to a single Wednesday of every month.  Chris Brecheen claimed I was, in his words, "shticky."   Fortunately I have been replaced by a guy who lists everything, and two women who seem prone to inflict violence on poor writing, one with some kind of cannon on the clones of pretentious people, and the other by karate chopping bad advice.  Certainly nothing shticky there.

However, I shall do nothing if not preserve in the face of adversity.  Those of us who understand the difference between good literature and popular tripe have no end of familiarity with what it means to be under assault for pointing out how much better we are than the unwashed plebs.

And with that said, we move on to take a look at Sir Gawain and The Green Knight.  It will be a brief look, for while there are a host of valid literary criticism lenses through which to interpret this late fourteenth century text, there is only one lens that matters.

Is it genre crap?

The answer is a resounding yes.  Sir Gawain is challenged by some sort of alien plant person...knight...thing early in the poem, and if that were not enough they get into a head chopping-off contest.  Normally you would think that whomever went first in such a contest would be the clear victor.  Yes, you would think that.  However, even though the green knight has his head lopped clean off off, he picks it up and walks away, forcing Sir Gawain to find him in one year and one day for his turn.  

To say that realism isn't among this poem's virtues is understatement.  But since I'm terribly British sounding, I like understatement.

In the end Sir Gawain is nothing more than a classic example of high fantasy adventure, complete with a far flung quest, wizards, shape-shifters, a simply ridiculous framing of good vs. evil that defies credulity, and finger-wagging didactic lesson about being a "good person" within a wrap up that blamed the whole thing on the evil arch-nemesis Morgana LeFay.

Now, if Gawain had pursued his affair and learned of the deep seated dysfunction between Bertilak and his lady, due largely to his questioning of his sexuality, if they had carried on their affair even as Gawain led Bertilak on, eventually murdered him, returned to the knights to lie about his involvement and then had to live with the darkness of his human condition, then this might have been worthy of literature.

As it is...as the kids today say: "Not so much."

Lady Felicity St. John-Smythe Reviews The Odyssey (Guest Blog)

Lady Felicity St. John-Smythe stepping in here to take the reins from Guy Goodman St.White and say a few words about one of the foundational works of the western canon. Yes, that magnificent prototype of the journey or quest motif that has influenced such distinguished and well-regarded works of high literary reputation as Huckleberry Finn, Don Quixote, Watership Down, Moby Dick and, dare I say it, that pinnacle of modern literature, Ulysses. I am speaking, of course, about the incomparable Odyssey composed by Homer in approximately the 8th century BCE.

The Odyssey is focused on that hero of the Trojan War, Odysseus, he of the delightful Trojan Horse stratagem which allowed the Acheaens to trick the Trojans into opening the gates of their city and led to the utterly delicious sacking of Troy. While much of The Odyssey is concerned with Odysseus’ struggles to return to his long-suffering wife, Penelope, and much of the story is, apparently, factual, it is, I feel, necessary to point out a few small problems where Homer felt compelled to spice up the narrative, so to speak, and thereby weakened his rather compelling tale.

While, as is typical of most early examples of literature including Gilgamesh and The Aeneid, gods and goddesses pop in and out of the story like rabbits in a fallow field, Homer makes extensive use of this device at crucial moments. He has Athena tell Odysseus’ son to go visit some of his father’s friends just at the point where the suitors are planning to kill him, and, once Odysseus has returned home, has Athena (again, it’s like the man only knew one goddess in the pantheon) change Odysseus’ appearance so many times it’s like he’s made of Play-Doh. But the true piece de resistance in the whole thing is the fantastical story Odysseus tells of the ten years he spent supposedly struggling to return to his beloved Ithaca and his wife.

Filled with goddesses who seduce him, gods who want to kill him, monsters of all shapes and sizes, men turning into pigs, steaks that begin to moo on the spit, and, horror of all horrors, a trip to the land of the dead where Odysseus speaks to the ghosts of fallen comrades, the whole thing descends into an utter travesty of fantastical story-telling. It is obviously the work of a man trying to, dare I say it, cover his ass when he comes crawling back home ten years after the rest of his friends and expects his wife to welcome him with open arms.

Unfortunately, Homer’s telling of the story places the work squarely within the realm of genre fiction, though which genre is difficult to say since there are so many to choose from – fantasy, horror, paranormal romance – the possibilities are endless. Thank goodness James Joyce managed to wipe the fantastical elements right out of that story and return it to the exalted realms of literature where it belongs.

So this is Lady Felicity St. John-Smythe wishing you a fond farewell and happy travels through the pages of serious literature. Remember, stories about monsters are only for children. Grown-ups never read such tripe. And now I turn the reins back to you, Guy.

[Thanks to Diane Glazman (whose blog, Confessions of a Word Slut, is worth checking out) for channeling Lady Felicity St.John-Smythe to do today's guest blog.]

Guy Goodman St.White Reviews Le Morte d'Arthur--Cliche Genre Tripe

The original cliche quest...

Good Evening.  I'm Guy Goodman St.White your absurdly British sounding host, and this evening we will be looking at what is perhaps the best source of Arthurian legend. While there are plenty of sources of the legendary histories of Britain, brought to us through a proverbial "daisy chain" of translations (Geoffrey of Monmouth to Wace to Layamon) , Mallory's version, written in the mid 15th century,  is perhaps the best well known and most often used as source material for more modern adaptations. Mallory did not write Le Morte d'Arthur, but rather translated and compiled prior 13th century French texts.  He probably did this in prison, which should give you an idea of exactly the sort of despicable character he was.

It isn't clear why Mallory was in prison, but it is probably for crimes against real literature. As a progenitor to the entire Romance genre, Le Morte d'Arthur is bad enough, but it delves deeply into the madness of speculative fiction itself. Indeed while it didn't achieve renown until a later revival of medievalist fanbois interested in all things Romantic, it is not a far cry to say that Mallory also planted the first seeds of high fantasy.

Quests, knights, magic around every corner, curses, wizards who shape-shift into all sorts of forms and (according to some accounts) live backwards, and, of course no tally of this travesty would be complete without a mention of The Holy Grail. Clearly nothing this steeped in speculative fiction could possibly have any literary value to speak of.

It was as if Mallory were providing a genre blueprint of everything to come. It was as if he wanted to give millions of speculative fiction authors a formula for writing reams upon reams of crap. It was as if he declared actual war on real literature. Clearly no amount of time he spent in prison could ever redeem him of this crime against what is worthy of being read.

I am Guy Goodman St.White and thank you for joining me in another episode of Speculative Fiction Sucks Balls (And Not in the Good Way).  Please join us next week, right here on Writing About Writing where a guest blogger will take a look at The Odyssey.  Good night.

Guy Goodman St.White Reviews The Illiad--Genre Crap

If you thought a demi-god raging in a way only the gods can is unrealistic, wait until you see what speculative fiction nonsense happens next....

Good evening. I'm Guy Goodman St.White, and I am your terribly British sounding host. Today we shall hearken back to the ancient Greeks, as they are the progenitors of so much of our philosophical thought, and examine The Illiad. Unlike your cheeseburger or that cool special effect, The Illiad actually is "epic." Traditionally thought to be written by Homer, The Illiad roughly chronicles a few weeks in the last year of the Trojan war.

I could tell I was in trouble by the first line. The "wrath" or "rage" spoken of is a word reserved for the gods, and far from mere hyperbole, the Illiad takes a speculative turn into genre-ville right away. The non-stop meddling by supernatural forces--in this case the gods--brings almost an entire new dimension to the concept of Desu Ex Machina. Every two or three pages some "god" is butting in and changing the outcome. The whole thing turns into a ghastly speculative fiction goulash by the end of the first page.

I wish I could blame Homer for his descent from real literature worth reading into the dregs of genre. A battlefield is such a ripe time for confronting duty vs. desire, the morality of war, and the human condition. He *ALMOST* got somewhere interesting with the end conversation between Priam and Achilles. Sadly, that's probably the best we can hope for from these Greeks with their hero worship, and their need to have a god for everything, so instead we face down a melange of supernatural forces vying to affect the protagonists with a series of completely implausible direct interventions. It takes a seriously supernatural pile of rubbish to make Beowulf look positively banal by comparison.

Please join me next week right here on Writing about Writing for our next installment of Speculative Fiction Sucks Balls (And Not in the Good Way.) Good night.

Guy Goodman St.White Reviews The Epic of Gilgamesh--Epic Genre Crap (Literally)

You can't demonstrate the human condition without realism.
And there's nothing realistic about that thing in the middle of the tablet.

Good Evening. I'm Guy Goodman St.White your terribly British sounding host, and tonight we'll be delving back into the Western canon, long before Beowulf, to explore some of the roots of Western literature. I'd like to start our evening with two small disclaimers. For starters, we will only be reviewing dead religions as literature. While there is some qualitative value in examining living religious texts under literary scrutiny, I already receive enough death threats for reasons I cannot possibly fathom, and I don't want to exacerbate those uppity religious sort to be any more irrational than they already are. Don't worry though, we will only briefly study a few texts of the Ancient Middle East, and will revert quite quickly to the works of Europe.

No need to worry that we're not studying enough white voices.  Just a necessary evil.

The Epic of Gilgamesh: I'm not even sure where to begin with this one.

I'm genuinely overwhelmed. The sheer level of preposterous absurdity going on in this story has literally overwhelmed me. Gods. Demigods. Ogres. Giant bulls. Scorpion people. Precognitive psychic dream powers. A fight scene pretty much once a tablet. Huge, Earth-covering floods (which, as you know, are only achieve credulity in Judeo/Christian tradition, and become completely implausible otherwise). Immortality. In many ways it is no surprise that we had to endure an epic like Beowulf as the fountainhead of English tradition. Look at where the older tradition lies. Look at what they had to work with. This non-stop melange of genre imagery is chock full of speculative tropes and is real literature's and high art's worst nightmare.

Clearly there is nothing of literary value within The Epic of Gilgamesh. It is just another superhero versus a monster-of-the-week mash up with no redeeming qualities or meaningful themes. I haven't seen anything this god awful since my 14 year old cousin from America forced me to watch a disk of some Yank show called Supernatural. If Enkidu had been questioning his sexuality and killed by homophobic bigots, Gilgamesh had been struggling against the preconceptions of his society and raging alcoholism, and the whole thing had been set in the seedy mud brick reality of Babylon, this might have been a better story. As it is, I had to gird myself against actual physical revulsion with each new tablet. The Mesopotamian people certainly had enough real-world struggles trying to establish the patriarchy and civilize an entire world of hunter/gatherers to need to resort to fanciful tales of the supernatural. Is it any wonder the whole of Western society is not capable of determining what is actually good to read?

Thank you for joining us this evening, and please tune in next week for another edition of Speculative Fiction Sucks Balls (And Not in the Good Way) where we'll return to the British Isles and take a look at what some seriously white dead white guys have written. Good night.

Guy Goodman St.White Reviews Beowulf--Genre Crap

Why the earliest known work of Anglo-Saxon fiction got English literature off to a speculative start, and there went the neighborhood.

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-Man (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.