…. This artificial separation between us is painful, it is undignified, and it fools no one. In company, we sneer at each other and make those cold, cutting remarks. And why? You laugh at me for telling the same stories again and again. I call you boring and joyless. Is it wrong, my dear, that I hope the cruel things I say of you cut as deeply as the ones you say of me?

But allow me this, dear: what you do is crueler. You take the best of me, my most glorious moments – Ursula LeGuin and Dashiell Hammet, Mary Shelly and Philip Dick – and you claim them for your own. You say that they “transcend genre”. There are no more heartless words than those. You disarm me. You know, I think, that if we were to compare our projects honestly — my best to yours, my mediocrities to yours, our failures lumped together — this division between us would vanish, and so you skim away my cream and mock me for being only milk.

I forgive you. I weep and I resent and I say how little I care what your opinions are. And, let me be honest, dear, I take comfort in the fact that I make more money than you. That my audience is larger. Outside the narrow halls of the academy, my star is brighter. I go to the movies, and I am on every marquee. A television is practically my mirror. My house is larger and warmer, and the people there laugh and weep more loudly. Not all of them are sophisticates. Many of them find comfort and solace in things you consider beneath you. But they are my people, and I love them as they love me.

The relationship ‘twixt “genre fiction” and “literature” is a strange one. If genre fiction is good enough, it must be literature and not genre fiction. Because, well, as we all know, genre cannot be literature.

And in a way it’s true. There is no guarantee that the craftsman who makes the finest knives can actually cook. Nor the farmer who grows the bell peppers, nor rancher with his cattle.

But at the same time, the food metaphor doesn’t hold true. What genre most resents is being treated like cheese doodles while some truly abhorrent literary gastronomica is considered haute cuisine for the simple fact that it is literature, and not genre fiction.

On the other hand, I’ve been in a five-star restaurant that once served me, as a pre-appetizer course, two slices of albino beet with a smear of goat cheese between, a single forkful of something that looked like some potato shreds mixed with overcooked cheese, and a homemade marshmallow with powdered carrot on top. You know, quite literally because the chef felt like dawdling around in the kitchen that day, and that’s what he came up with.

Sometimes people need soul food. Or a bit of greasy spoon. And if you can’t tell the two apart, that’s fine. Because if you ever find yourself in that scene from L.A. Story, at a restaurant called “L’Idiot”, reciting Steve Martin’s refrain—”I’m already finished and I don’t remember eating”—then yes, you will think kindly upon the never-ending hash browns, or a bacon cheeseburger with curly fries and a chocolate shake, or any number of genre foods that have done more than their share to sustain, and even please.

-bd

–msg

His name is Squiddly Diddly ... but he looks like an octopus.

Measuring the minds of other creatures is a perplexing problem. One yardstick scientists use is brain size, since humans have big brains. But size doesn’t always match smarts. As is well known in electronics, anything can be miniaturized. Small brain size was the evidence once used to argue that birds were stupid—before some birds were proven intelligent enough to compose music, invent dance steps, ask questions, and do math.

Octopuses have the largest brains of any invertebrate. Athena’s is the size of a walnut—as big as the brain of the famous African gray parrot, Alex, who learned to use more than one hundred spoken words meaningfully. That’s proportionally bigger than the brains of most of the largest dinosaurs.

Another measure of intelligence: you can count neurons. The common octopus has about 130 million of them in its brain. A human has 100 billion. But this is where things get weird. Three-fifths of an octopus’s neurons are not in the brain; they’re in its arms.

“It is as if each arm has a mind of its own,” says Peter Godfrey-Smith, a diver, professor of philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and an admirer of octopuses. For example, researchers who cut off an octopus’s arm (which the octopus can regrow) discovered that not only does the arm crawl away on its own, but if the arm meets a food item, it seizes it—and tries to pass it to where the mouth would be if the arm were still connected to its body.

Fascinating stuff. Perhaps we should have an “arms race” to achieve best-selling fiction featuring a talking octopus. You know, something more mystical and philosophical than a Hanna Barbera cartoon.

Okay, okay, I’m sure I could come up with something better than that. Probably. With some thought. But, in truth, I’ve had this link from Orion magazine sitting on my desktop for nearly a month. Sometimes, you know, we can’t let go of an idea without doing something with it.

Which notion, of course, makes for a story in itself.

-bd

You know, that little picture on the right. Click it. Go on. It won’t bite.

(You are aware, of course, that I’m being sarcastic? I mean, the bit about the atrocity. SMBC is one of the best comics going on the web. Or is this somehow not a useless disclaimer? Never mind; I’m just confusing myself.)

-bd

At any rate, Andrew McConnell Stott explains:

Defoe’s novel, published in 1722, is a mutant factual-fiction that recounts the plague epidemic of 1665, which dispatched almost 100,000 Londoners. Purporting to be the “memorial” of a survivor known only as “H.F.”, it was based on genuine documentary sources, including the diary of Defoe’s uncle.

For something so grounded in fact, A Journal of the Plague Year conforms to the expectations of zombie narratives in almost every way. People look to the skies for the origin of the pestilence, as in George A. Romero’s Day of the Dead; its city of spacious abandonment and grassed-over streets anticipates the empty metropolis of Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later; and as the King takes flight and the law implodes, the living are faced with the decision to team-up or go it alone in the style of Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead, where zombie-battling is merely a skull-cleaving interlude between the real battles for resources.

What A Journal of the Plague Year doesn’t have is zombies—at least not explicitly. Still, the numberless, suppurating victims are apt to behave like the undead at every turn ….

No, really, I’ve got nothing on that. Although … there is an e-text of Dafoe’s story available from the University of Adelaide Library.

-bd

Rather, let us start with Roxanne Gay, who tries to scrabble together an overview of a question that recently rippled through the publishing world:

When you write a book with the title It’s A Man’s World, with the tagline “but it takes a woman to run it,” you have to have some sense that your book is going to be marketed in a certain way. I haven’t read the book in question, but the title certainly gives an impression. Maybe it’s just me but when I see that title, I think “chick lit.” I also enjoy “chick lit,” so that label is not a bad thing. That book’s author, Polly Courtney, recently had a very public reaction to how her book was being marketed as “chick-lit,” announcing she was leaving her publisher, Harper Collins, so her writing wouldn’t be pigeonholed. As writers, we often have to worry about whether or not our work will be pigeonholed based on some aspect of our identity. No one wants their creativity limited or misrepresented; pushing back against rigid, often unfair categories is a natural response for a creative person.

In her explanation for why she was leaving her publisher, Courtney distinguishes between women’s fiction, which she writes, and “chick lit,” which she very much does not. I gather that women’s fiction is serious while “chick lit” is not. She writes, “Don’t get me wrong; chick-lit is a worthy sub-genre and there is absolutely a place for it on the shelves. Some publishers, mine included, are very successful at marketing this genre to women. The problem comes when non-chick lit content is shoe-horned into a frilly “chick-lit” package. Everyone is then disappointed: the author, for seeing his or her work portrayed as such; the readers, for finding there is too much substance in the plot; and the passers-by, who might actually have enjoyed the contents but dismissed the book on the grounds of its frivolous cover.”

Depending on the content of the book in question, Courtney is correct in noting that disappointment is possible for everyone involved in the consumption of a book. At the same time, isn’t a cover is just a cover? Eventually, the writing speaks for itself and either readers will like the work or they won’t. Readers are fairly sophisticated these days, aren’t they? I would like to believe readers will, more often than not, have a good sense of what a book is or isn’t about no matter what is emblazoned across the cover. Unfortunately, such does not seem to be the case and certain books are burdened by covers that alienate certain audiences.

For her own part, Polly Courtney explained the decision to leave HarperCollins in The Guardian:

The term “women’s fiction” has been adopted by publishers and retailers alike as a shorthand for fiction that involves shopping sprees, bodily insecurities and the hunt for Mr Right. No – hang on. That’s “chick lit”, isn’t it?

This is the problem. The line that used to define “chick lit” as a sub-genre of women’s fiction has blurred, giving publishers the authority to brand huge swathes of fiction in pink and green swirly covers, on the assumption that this is what women want. As Margaret Carroll, a fellow ex-HarperCollins author, put it: “Very ironic to find this is an industry run by women.”

I do not labour under any illusion; my novels are not literary masterpieces – but nor are they chick-lit. So, you may ask, why did I sign with an imprint that specialises in high-volume commercial fiction? The answer to this lies in the way that we are trained, as authors, to believe that even so much as a glance from a traditional publishing house is an honour and a privilege. They are the experts. They know more about books than the authors do themselves. We should be grateful that a prestigious publishing house will give us the time of day. It is like a gift from God when a book deal lands in our lap.

I don’t know, so I’ll leave it to everyone else to figure out. In truth, I don’t delve deeply into “women’s fiction” or “chick lit”. But I can at least offer two points about the question. “Chick lit” sounds derogatory to my ear, in part because it is virtually homophonic to a brand of tiny, square lozenges of chewing gum. Never mind. It probably has more to do with the dismissive tone with which men describe films as “chick flicks”. (I mean, really, have you actually seen the cinematic disaster known as Chantilly Lace? I mean, you’d think, with that cast … er … right. Never mind.)

But maybe the chick flick aspect is part of the problem. And, of course, maybe I have a distorted view of chick flicks in general, since I’m not the target market. But it seems to me that there is a fundamental difference between valences. Women’s fiction, as such, tends to fall under that vague notion of “mainstream” literature, while chick lit seems more a superficial sales genre. Women’s fiction might capture a moment in time, while chick lit depends on that moment. Sarah Orne Jewett’s classic Country of the Pointed Firs might well be considered “women’s fiction”, but it is also treated as literature alongside William Dean Howells, Charles Chesnutt, and Willa Cather. When one says women’s fiction, I might think of Joyce Carol Oates or Alice Walker. When one says chick lit, yeah, I think of my mother cracking up over a Janet Evanovich novel involving old women farting in hot pants.

Here’s a question, then, for the ages: Is Anita Shreve’s debut novel, Eden Close, a mystery, women’s fiction, or chick lit?

Or Alice Walker actually serves as a great example here. Is Alice Walker …

• … a great black author?
• … a great female author?
• … a great black female author?
• … a great author?

The problem with certain labels is that they can shape the definition of an artwork. Perhaps Meridian is a good example of “black literature”, but it’s also a damn good story, damn well written, and deserving of classification as literature without any especial adjectives.

I do see a difference between women’s fiction and chick lit, but it’s a hard one to explain. It even brings to mind a feminist term of extremely limited usage, “herstory”, which attempts to describe history through women’s eyes. But one cannot hold that the difference is whether a women’s fiction story rises to the level of literature, with all that implies; it is too high a standard. There is plenty of mainstream (tacitly, I suppose, for our purposes), “men’s” fiction that neither fits any particular genre nor rises to the level of fine literature. But men’s fiction brings to mind Mack Bolan novels, or the gratuitous, even useless sex scenes in Dean Koontz stories.

Perhaps the great lesson here, of course, is that I’m rambling, and really should take up the habit of review and revision instead of simply posting one-drafters, but, as noted, this isn’t about me.

Women’s fiction. Chick lit. Literature in the context of the literary masterpiece. I can’t tell you specifically what chick lit is, but I know that the phrase ought not apply to Alice Walker, Joyce Carol Oates, or even Jane Yolen. At the same time, it’s hard for me to not sound like I’m disparaging chick lit. So, right. Never mind. I’ll leave it to everyone else to hash out.

—bd

-bd

(Isn’t that sweet? Thank you so much, Claudia. I’m certain MSG is smiling. And if not, we’ll try the stapler.)

Why, you ask? The first time I attended this conference, I was scared to death. My knees rattled, my breathing arrested, my heart clutched inside my chest. I was a newbie. What the hell did I know about writing? But then, at the opening session, Michael Steven Gregory, the head of the conference, spoke in his loud announcer-like voice, reassuring me and the rest of the writers in the room that we would SUCK LESS at writing after having attended this conference. His humor and his honesty relaxed us all. And we remained hopeful, that as we tread in these unventured waters, we’d learn how to swim.

He encouraged us to network, and challenged us to introduce ourselves to someone new. He told us that the best networking happens in the bar. I took his advice and found that he was right. While it’s true that I might spend a little more time there now than I should, I’ve also made some of the best connections, cultivated some of the best friendships and met some of the most talented people I could ever hope to meet.

I should also mention that this is where I met my publisher, Karen Syed of Echelon Press, and where I entered my essay in the SCWC/Hummingbird Review contest and … WON! I’m not trying to toot my own horn here, just share with you the wonderful things that can happen at SCWC.

I mean, really. I don’t think if we were to throw together a late-night infomercial that I could script a testimony like that.

So come on. What have you got to lose? I mean, who doesn’t want to suck less?

SCWC LA9 is slated for September 23-25, in Newport Beach. Be there. Really. Or I’ll have to send Claudia with the stapler.

(Claudia Whitsitt is the author of The Wrong Guy, published by Echelon Press.)

-bd

As our sordid barman wrestles with his own vanity, one commenter offers the sort of compliment that only a writer can love:

(Sorry, man. I just couldn’t resist.)

-bd

C’mon … sign up. Don’t make MSG sad. I even borrowed his Facebook picture. Because he’s smiling. He smiles when he’s happy, and you’ll see his smiling face if you sign up and make your way to Newport Beach for the Ninth Annual Southern California Writers Conference, Los Angeles edition. Or, as we like to call it, LA 9.

Be there, or … er … uh … yeah. Be there.

-bd