Apparently, I am participating in the Literary Trivia Smackdown at the 21st Annual Indie and Small Press Book Fair here in NYC. It's going to be Ed, Sarah, Levi and myself, representing the lit bloggers, versus a bunch of punks from PEN America who are SO going DOWN. The book fair is free for all and runs both Saturday and Sunday this weekend at the General Society, 20 W44th St. in Manhattan. The Smackdown is on Sunday at 4pm.

The New York Review of Books already ran from us with their tail between their legs. Now we're going to treat PEN like Plaxico treated his own leg. Boo ya!

“That Wall Street has gone down because of this is justice,” he says. “They fucked people. They built a castle to rip people off. Not once in all these years have I come across a person inside a big Wall Street firm who was having a crisis of conscience.”

Michael Lewis, author of Liar's Poker, which described the financial problems going on in the 1980's, returns to talk about what went wrong this time. Here are the gory details of the sub-prime market and the story of one hedge fund manager who saw it all coming, shorted the whole mess, and told everyone what was going to happen as loudly as he could. No one was listening, and his own shorts helped fuel the ever-more-self-destructive system.

Via Austin Bunn

James Gunn has written an essay about the "protocols of science fiction", a concept he draws from the 1984 Samual R. Delany essay collection Starboard Wine (or more exactly, the MLA conference that preceeded it). (This book is sadly out-of-print and difficult to find -- Amazon Auctions has a copy for $175 or so -- though Matt Chaney is leading the effort to bring out a new edition.) In the essay, Gunn, quoting Delany, says that Science Fiction does not work in the same way as other written categories, in that it has "specific conventions, unique focuses, areas of interest and excellence, as well as its own particular ways of making sense out of language." Gunn then introduces an example, the story "Sail On! Sail On!" by Philip José Farmer.

I just want to say that I agree wholeheartedly with Dan Green's analysis of Nigel Beale's commentary. I am almost coming to resent the notion that all good stories have to be--and are necessarily--character driven.

Certainly the origins of the novel do not lie in "situations" that are rendered as closely as possible to those of "real life." Precursors to the novel such as Gulliver's Travels or Garganua and Pantagruel are plot-heavy phantasmagorias, anything but explorations of character, while most of the earliest actual novels, Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, Tom Jones, are either explicitly picaresque narratives whose characters never develop beyond their roles in the plots or tales in which what happens is clearly the focal point, not characters "relevant to me and my life." Those readers like Nigel, who recoil from novels "which impose artificial form on formless real life experience," even when such form is simply "plot," have formed a relationship with fiction rooted in late-nineteenth century realism, later developed into "pyschological realism," that might arguably be called character-centered, but such readers assume this sort of fiction essentially brought literary history to a halt and that other kinds of fiction, less dependent on "lifeness" so very narrowly conceived, are simply marginal, trivial, empty flourishes easily ignored. Only character-driven realism is "natural."

Let me put it this way; if you say that all good fiction is character driven, then you close the door on almost all fiction (in any form) written before the rise of psychological realism. To which I say this: Can a modern person read The Odyssey and enjoy it? They can and do, despite that book's focus on plot over character. So why couldn't a great modern book emphasize plot or ideas (or anything else) over character? In fact, of course, many do, but I should hardly have to bring up the post-modernists again, or Borges, or weird visionaries like Philip K. Dick.

I think 21st century fiction might turn out to be the process of crawling out of the tyrannical grip of psychological realism that the 20th century gave to us.

At the risk of seeming like I link to Ed to much, I want to draw attention to this post in which Ed Champion gets an email from honest-to-God Billy Joel ("Fuck you," says Billy), responds to it, and then (in one of the most entertaining exchanges I've seen in a while) Joel himself shows up in the comments to engage in an enormous flame war.

Billy: "...your inability or your refusal to follow a simple lyric pattern is symptomatic of either a mental disorder or a hearing defect..."

Ed: "...Just be honest, Billy. You did it for the cash. The guy who wrote the sardonic anti-yuppie song “My Life” is gone. (Indeed, you’ve BECOME that yuppie.)..."

Billy: "...THIS IS MY LIFE. This is what I do and who I am, and your ignorant, self-righteous ’sellout’ attack is typical of a dilettante, an amateur, and an abject failure. It was never about “the cash”. You will never know the joy I have known, and you will never accomplish anything in your life until you learn humility the way I have : The hard way..."

I officially am not interested in watching Heroes anymore.

So, at least that's 1 hour a week I can spend doing something else.

The complete Bat Segundo show DVD's. Every show from Mr. Segundo, a mere $50.

Michael Peterson's latest comics column in The House Next Door, which is a fascinating analysis of comics as cartography, contains this aside:

The Best American Comics was established three years ago as a counterpart to other "Best American" collections of prose writing and has largely maintained the same roster of talent in each annual edition.

...

I was digging through some old notes in preparation for this installment on an especially bitter night in 2005, after attending a gallery opening here in Chicago hosted by cartoonist Ivan Brunetti, editor of a Yale anthology of comics very similar to the "Best American" books. The gallery featured the same few folks; I hurled out some invective that evening, some of which I'm inclined to retract and some of which is still true today:

Brunetti is part of that society of cartoonists that holds our most public faces—Spiegelman and Ware, Chester Brown and Seth and Joe Matt, Daniel Clowes and Adrian Tomine and the rest of those who hold Schultz and Crumb as the binary star which we should orbit. They're the ones that sit at the Big Kids Table, and at this point, we're resigned to it. They're married to our roots in the daily and Sunday strips, and for many, that form is what informs their every creation, a view that cannot be disentangled. The comic book as a unit is the stuff of old pulps. To stray too far into genre territory, other than as an ironic metaphor, is to obfuscate your message and resign yourself to obscurity.

This all reminded me quite a lot of my own questioning of genre's acceptance by the mainstream critical world. After all this site was practically founded as a reaction to the predominance of quotidian, autobiographical, realist fiction in the "literary" world, exactly the kind of fiction that dominates both the Best American Comics and (usually) the Best American Short Stories anthologies.

With that in mind, let's take a look at the critical estimation of works in verious media, as judged by some well-known "best of" lists.

I've always thought that when writers say they don't know where their ideas come from, it's a bit of a cop-out. Ideas are everywhere; you write about the things you're obsessed with, or think are cool, or think other writers aren't doing right. It's not actually coming up with the idea that's hard, but executing it successfully.

To wit, here's David Moles' fascinating series of posts on coming up with ideas, in which he somehow fuses together Tom Waits and HP Lovecraft:

1. A Change of Clothes: Sexuality, procreation, the human body, invertebrates, marine life in general, fat people, people of other races, race-mixing, slums, percussion instruments…
   • Digression: the trick: Myths of the 20th century
2. The Names of Towns: …caves, cellars, old age, great expanses of time, monumental architecture, non-Euclidean geometry, deserts, oceans, rats…
   • Digression: the trick (pt. 2): Lateral thinking
3. Something to Eat: …the New England countryside, New York City, fungi and molds, viscous substances, medical experiments, dreams, brittle textures, gelatinous textures…
4. Some Weather: …the color gray, plant life of diverse sorts, memory lapses, old books, heredity, mists, gases, whistling, whispering…
   • Digression: the trick (pt. 3): “You have to make them out of things you’ve found”

Lots of people really likeDune. It's spawned a movie, a couple of TV mini-series, several video games, at least one comic book adaptation, and a continuing series of books written by the book's late author's son in order to cash in on the gullible mouth breathers who think there is value in the franchise. The pro-Dune camp believes that this book and the series it spawned are "classic," "masterfully crafted," "well-planned," novels. Do a quick google search, and you will find no shortage of people who are willing to ascribe adjective phrases like "beautifully written," "elegant," and "brillant" to this novel.

I respectfully—well, sort of— disagree with this assessment, and taking a page out of slacktivist's close reading of Left Behind, given how widespread respect for Dune is even occasionally outside of the science fiction ghetto, I think it's high time someone pointed out how terribly flawed, immoral, and transparently lacking in complexity Dune actually is.

I don't know how many entries this is going to take, but beginning next week after I've been able to procure another copy of the book, I'll be posting a page by page and occasionally line-by-line commentary on the book in the hopes of exposing it for the massively deficient and incompetent piece of literature that it is.

All comments are welcome, particularly from those who think that there's something of value in this trash that I'm missing.

I'm looking forward to the project and expect that it will take me some time to complete. I hope you all enjoy it, or at least learn to enjoy Dune a little bit less.