Too many good bits to quote just one.

"I suspect that the literary equivalent of “code that performs nothing” is authorial “voice.” Literary null-objects are certain kinds of refined word-choices and grammatical stylings that convey the “message” of “I’m the author and you’re the reader.” One can skate along on this blather for quite a while without venturing to state much of anything; but “voice” keeps the channels open, and prevents the crash-state of the reader standing up and throwing the book against the wall."

"If there is one genre that has captured the imagination of people in all walks of life throughout the world, it is the fairy tale. Yet we still have great difficulty understanding how it originated, evolved, and spread--or why so many people cannot resist its appeal, no matter how it changes or what form it takes. In this book, renowned fairy-tale expert Jack Zipes presents a provocative new theory about why fairy tales were created and retold--and why they became such an indelible and infinitely adaptable part of cultures around the world.
"Drawing on cognitive science, evolutionary theory, anthropology, psychology, literary theory, and other fields, Zipes presents a nuanced argument about how fairy tales originated in ancient oral cultures, how they evolved through the rise of literary culture and print, and how, in our own time, they continue to change through their adaptation in an ever-growing variety of media. In making his case, Zipes considers a wide range of fascinating examples, including fairy tales told, collected, and written by women in the nineteenth century; Catherine Breillat's film adaptation of Perrault's "Bluebeard"; and contemporary fairy-tale drawings, paintings, sculptures, and photographs that critique canonical print versions.
"While we may never be able to fully explain fairy tales, The Irresistible Fairy Tale provides a powerful theory of how and why they evolved--and why we still use them to make meaning of our lives."

"As the world undergoes daily transformations through the application of technoscience to every aspect of life, science fiction has become an essential mode of imagining the horizons of possibility. However much science fiction texts vary in artistic quality and intellectual sophistication, they share in a mass social energy and a desire to imagine a collective future for the human species and the world. At this moment, a strikingly high proportion of films, commercial art, popular music, video and computer games, and non-genre fiction have become what Csicsery-Ronay calls science fictional, stimulating science-fictional habits of mind. We no longer treat science fiction as merely a genre-engine producing formulaic effects, but as a mode of awareness, which frames experiences as if they were aspects of science fiction. The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction describes science fiction as a constellation of seven diverse cognitive attractions that are particularly formative of science-fictionality. These are the seven beauties of the title: fictive neology, fictive novums, future history, imaginary science, the science-fictional sublime, the science-fictional grotesque, and the Technologiade, or the epic of technsocience's development into a global regime."

Being a review of Paula Merriman's _Mungojerrie: A Brief History of the Cat Corset_.

"The Arthur C. Clarke Award shortlist came out. Christopher Priest, who you may remember from The Prestige, does not approve of it no way no how.
"Now, I actually like his post. I’m not going to call it a rant because I don’t enjoy that word–it seems to downplay the possibility of Getting Mad on Your Blog having any style, craft, or critical merit and it’s not really a rant when it’s reasoned, clever, and passionate. Whether you agree with Priest or not, it is all of those things. In fact, “Have we lived and fought in vain?” his comment on Greg Bear’s latest, is one of the great oh-this-fallen-world zingers I’ve heard in lo these many years.
"Way back in grad school, one of my professors said he felt quite fondly toward Harold Bloom, though he found many of the man’s ideas toxic and wrong-headed. “We need,” he said “somebody to go on TV in a leather jacket and cry about the death of literature. Somebody has to do that for us, as a culture.”
"Well, it looks like Priest has taken up the leather for us this year. And I’m fine with that because someone has to do it. Someone has to move the Overton Window ever so slightly toward high art. High art gets crapped on all the time, and even the phrase is basically a self-reflexive accusation/admission of elitism. But things get shitty, Sturgeon’s Law applies, the center cannot hold, and very occasionally, as high-maintenance lunch-to-literature conversion machines, we need Mommy and Daddy to not be proud of us to spur us on to write better books, to synthesize the high and the popular a little better every time. You will find a thousand authors arguing that what is popular is ipso facto good and anyone who says otherwise is a pseudo-intellectual heel. One guy should be able to say the opposite.

[nice essay snipped]

"No one is going to go: hey, you know, he’s right, I am terrible and Imma fix it! The whole nature of books is that they speak to some humans and not others. The point of shedding tears about literature is not to stage some kind of intervention that moves everyone over to your way of thinking. That trick never works. It’s to piss people off so that somewhere somebody–probably not the people he lit into–thinks to herself: I’m gonna write something so good even that Priest jerk will bow low before my might. And the world is made better by that unspoken challenge.
"Whatever the ballot looks like next year, whatever trends and sales and celebrity and chance do to the state of the field, whatever cringing and wincing I have done this morning on behalf of the authors you have deemed unworthy, Mr. Priest, I can tell you one thing:
"You have neither lived nor fought in vain. I promise."

I have read none of the nominated books and so I have no legitimate opinion about whether he's being fair. (Except that I don't think that's a good description of Stross's style in general.) But it's a joy to watch.

"Not to belabor the point -- the story, which purports to be set in 2511, is actually set in roughly 1985, i think. And why did this not bother me while I was reading it, only to make me angry on the bicycle, later? Because I grew up reading SF stories written before 1985. I grew up reading rediscovered-lost-colony-FTL stories in which the protagonists got lost in the woods, and it was fun. It didn't occur to me then that they would have GPS cell phones. It was easy, this morning, to simply forget the world of today, and read as if I was in 1985. But on some level this is morally bankrupt. When you don't know something, you are innocent of it. Once you do know it, though, all that is possible is feigned innocence, or incoherence."

Potential problem of specificity: is this any worse in SF than in any other branch of fiction?

"The basic mistake that Fish is making is this: he pretends that humanists have no discovery process at all. For Fish, the interpretive act is always fully contained in an encounter with a single piece of evidence. How your “interpretive proposition” got framed in the first place is a matter of no consequence; some readers are just fortunate to have propositions that turn out to be correct. Fish is not alone in this idealized model of interpretation; it’s widespread among humanists."

"Besides familiar and now-commonplace tasks that computers do all the time, what else are they capable of? Stephen Ramsay's intriguing study of computational text analysis examines how computers can be used as "reading machines" to open up entirely new possibilities for literary critics. Computer-based text analysis has been employed for the past several decades as a way of searching, collating, and indexing texts. Despite this, the digital revolution has not penetrated the core activity of literary studies: interpretive analysis of written texts."

"The ever-expanding capacities of computing offer new narrative possibilities for virtual worlds. Yet vast narratives—featuring an ongoing and intricately developed storyline, many characters, and multiple settings—did not originate with, and are not limited to, Massively Multiplayer Online Games. Thomas Mann's Joseph and His Brothers, J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, Marvel's Spiderman, and the complex stories of such television shows as Dr. Who, The Sopranos, and Lost all present vast fictional worlds.

Third Person explores strategies of vast narrative across a variety of media, including video games, television, literature, comic books, tabletop games, and digital art. The contributors—media and television scholars, novelists, comic creators, game designers, and others—investigate such issues as continuity, canonicity, interactivity, fan fiction, technological innovation, and cross-media phenomena.

Chapters examine a range of topics, including storytelling in a multiplayer environment; narrative techniques for a 3,000,000-page novel; continuity (or the impossibility of it) in Doctor Who; managing multiple intertwined narratives in superhero comics; the spatial experience of the Final Fantasy role-playing games; World of Warcraft adventure texts created by designers and fans; and the serial storytelling of The Wire."

"Literature professors often encounter and complain about the student who arrives in their classes with a professed ‘love of literature’. We sometimes come to see our job as grimly breaking those blithe spirits on the wheel of the hard labor of criticism and dismissing them from our company when they refuse to come into the quarry and break stone." (Why do I like that sentence? The metaphors are horribly mixed.)

"The Gothic, Romanticism’s gritty older sibling, has flourished in myriad permutations since the eighteenth century. In Gothicka, Victoria Nelson identifies the revolutionary turn it has taken in the twenty-first. Today’s Gothic has fashioned its monsters into heroes and its devils into angels. It is actively reviving supernaturalism in popular culture, not as an evil dimension divorced from ordinary human existence but as part of our daily lives.

To explain this millennial shift away from the traditionally dark Protestant post-Enlightenment Gothic, Nelson studies the complex arena of contemporary Gothic subgenres that take the form of novels, films, and graphic novels. She considers the work of Dan Brown and Stephenie Meyer, graphic novelists Mike Mignola and Garth Ennis, Christian writer William P. Young (author of The Shack), and filmmaker Guillermo del Toro. She considers twentieth-century Gothic masters H.P. Lovecraft, Anne Rice, and Stephen King in light of both their immediate ancestors in the eighteenth century and the original Gothic—the late medieval period from which Horace Walpole and his successors drew their inspiration.

Fictions such as the Twilight and Left Behind series do more than follow the conventions of the classic Gothic novel. They are radically reviving and reinventing the transcendental worldview that informed the West’s premodern era. As Jesus becomes mortal in The Da Vinci Code and the child Ofelia becomes a goddess in Pan’s Labyrinth, Nelson argues that this unprecedented mainstreaming of a spiritually driven supernaturalism is a harbinger of what a post-Christian religion in America might look like."

Cf. Jo Walton, on how having a world unfold in one's mind is the primary SF reading experience. (I quote from memory.)

"We know that it was Henry James and no one else who killed Daisy Miller. James did not kill Daisy because he shared society’s view that her behavior was scandalous and intolerable, or Winterbourne’s milder version of that same judgment; these judgments were not his, but part of the story he told. It may be that he felt that he had to kill Daisy to protect himself (and his book) against Daisy’s fate. As it was, the book outraged many, and if Daisy had blithely returned to Schenectady and New York to wreak havoc there, the outrage would have been much more intense. Furthermore, if Daisy had returned to the United States without anything really big happening – for example, if she had returned married to Winterbourne* — it would have been anticlimactic. The demands of the story meant that Daisy had to die or something, and death was the only storyteller’s ending that would not have made James’ book too shocking to publish.

* Astonishingly to me, in 1883 James did write a dramatized version with a happy Daisy-marries-Winterbourne ending. The young author was apparently still finding his way."

--- Surely there must be fanfic where Daisy _does_ return to Schenectady to wreak havoc? Perhaps a historical mystery series?

"I am becoming increasingly convinced of the necessity of what seems to be a very crude intentionalist method in literary interpretation: that in many cases, the attitudes reflected by characters (or, to a lesser extent, situations) in various texts are in fact direct statements of the author’s own views.

Sophisticated readers tend to reject such a notion absolutely, and the reasons for this are usually good. Many attempts at creative writing start from what might be called the idealized projection of the self, or the creation of an environment in which certain wrongs might be redressed. Or where certain ideas find a more logical or consistent home, for that matter. The Mary Sue phenomenon is a reliable proxy for what I am talking about here.

I was reminded of this interpretive gambit, or problem, or however you want to construe it, when reading this NYT article on children kidnapped in Argentina’s “dirty war.” I was at first appalled that you won’t find the name “Kissinger” in the article, or any other mention of how the United States—driven by such nuanced reasoners as Jeanne Kirkpatrick—did nothing to intervene in such atrocities. I then thought of my long-held suspicion that the origin of Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun, which is a long first-person narrative of a torturer in a far-future South America who ends up redeeming humanity, was inspired by the news accounts from South America during the mid-to-late 70s. That’s not particularly interesting or novel, I suppose, but the fact that Severian offers up in the course of the novels an apologia for his profession has always struck me, in the care with which the argument is presented, as being endorsed by the author. (The argument is that essentially it’s more humane to torture people for crimes rather than to imprison them, and that also it is the only way to maintain order when threatened by external subversion. This last element—reprehensible as it is—is not argued as strongly in the text, to be fair.)"

"My problem is, I've seen Carnivale.
Carnivale, for those of you who don't know, was a criminally short-lived television show which was also about a Depression era circus, and also about a hapless and orphaned young man who gets hired on when the show sweeps through his town. But it is also about the death of the magical medieval world and the birth of the nuclear century, about the scars of WWI, about a peculiarly American mythology full of ghosts, boom towns, and wastelands, about magic, death, incest, and religion, about avatars of light and dark--but so deftly written that even in the end you were never sure which was which. It was about family and the road and show business and each character was fascinating, even when the hero was onstage. And Water for Elephants is about a kid who falls in love while working for the circus and then complains about everything in a nursing home."

"What are the requirements for writing a cult book? Readable style, significant subject-matter, and reckless assertion"

Henry on _The City and the City_, which I still haven't gotten to.

_The Wire_ as Victorian literature.

"has some very smart things to say about book criticism:"

"There is a reason that critics did stop making “is this great?” the first and last question of literary analysis (Edmundson is not wrong to say that this problem has been sidelined in cultural criticism, and this does indeed raise problems, as the concept of good and bad work is indispensible). The reason is that it’s a really hard philosophical problem that was made to seem easier through slight-of-hand when the answer was conflated with the preferences and tastes of a fairly narrow social class that held itself aloof from a wider public... I’d welcome an investigation of what makes some cultural works great and others ordinary or bad that was consciously intended to provide a critical toolkit to other readers and critics. ... Not a canon, but the foundation for making a canon...." - A canon foundry, as it were.

Too densely written to excerpt.  (And you definitely need to follow the early links for context.)

I have no idea at all whether this is fair, but it's a glorious rant.

... by which he means the first _properly human_, not the chronologically oldest, in much the same way that Marx somewhere said all social formation before socialism are properly speaking part of pre-history. (I make this comparison advisedly.)

"All of this is fine, if one recognizes that the idealized world Ayn Rand has created to facilitate her wishful theorizing has no more logical connection to our real one than a world in which an author has imagined humanity ruled by intelligent cups of yogurt. This is most obviously revealed by the fact that in Ayn Rand’s world, a man who self-righteously instigates the collapse of society, thereby inevitably killing millions if not billions of people, is portrayed as a messiah figure rather than as a genocidal prick, which is what he’d be anywhere else. Yes, he’s a genocidal prick with excellent engineering skills. Good for him. He’s still a genocidal prick. Indeed, if John Galt were portrayed as an intelligent cup of yogurt rather than poured into human form, this would be obvious. Oh my god, that cup of yogurt wants to kill most of humanity to make a philosophical point! Somebody eat him quick! And that would be that."

"Dexter is very definitely not 'about' repressed violent urges. ... Dexter isn't just 'repressed.' He's fully conscious of his cognitive shortcomings and miswirings and (during the run of the series) works to correct them, with mixed and intermittent success. In that regard he's more in touch with his feelings ('as a man' and otherwise) than pretty much anyone else on the show. It's a beautiful story, if you ask me, and not a bitter one."

"The Suck Fairy is an artefact of re-reading. If you read a book for the first time and it sucks, it’s nothing to do with her. It just sucks. Some books do. The Suck Fairy comes in when you come back to a book that you liked when you read it before, and on re-reading—well, it sucks. You can say that you have changed, you can hit your forehead dramatically and ask yourself how you could possibly have missed the suckiness the first time—or you can say that the Suck Fairy has been through while the book was sitting on the shelf and inserted the suck. The longer the book has been on the shelf unread, the more time she’s had to get into it. The advantage of this is exactly the same as the advantage of thinking of one’s once-beloved ex as having been eaten by a zombie, who is now shambling around using the name and body of the former person. It lets one keep one’s original love clear of the later betrayals."

"Its newness as a narrative art form is underscored most convincingly by its power on DVD, where it can be watched all at once, over sixty hours: this particular manner of viewing makes the literary accolades and the comparisons to a novel more justified and true. On the other hand, so engrossing, heart-tugging, and uncertain are the various story arcs that watching in this manner one becomes filled with a kind of mesmerized dread."

"I knew her work, a little. A few poems in the Paris Review, some elsewhere. And I think the poems were too true, steely odes to single women making a lonely go at living in cities, and so I left them where they were. Maybe one day, when I'm on solid ground, when I am completely surrounded by love at all times, I will feel strong enough to examine that thin line between solitude and loneliness, and how it disappears at 3am, or during firework displays, or when filling the blank that follows "Emergency Contact Name:"."

"Having a world unfold in one’s head is the fundamental SF experience." I think this is wonderfully insightful, but it's also almost a testable hypothesis.

That is a lovely paragraph, yes.

"My survey of around thirty prominent twentieth-century southern authors has led me to conclude, without fear of refutation, that there is indeed a single, simple, litmus-like test for the quality of southernness in literature, one easily formulated into a question to be asked of any literary text and whose answer may be taken as definitive, delimiting, and final. The test is: Is there a dead mule in it? As we shall see, the presence of one or more specimens of Equus caballus x asinus (defunctus) constitutes the truly catalytic element, the straw that stirs the strong and heady julep of literary tradition in the American South."

Mo Tkacik on Malcolm Gladwell. Massive, to be read later.

Walton is a good critic, to my mind, but this is the kind of thing which drives me up the wall. The claim is that certain sorts of books were written, and read, because they satisfied certain desires among a particular population of readers and writers; also that they had those desires because of certain historical events, and their social relations to those events. The evidence for this is, to be kind, thin. It works better as "couldn't you imagine writing books like this, if you felt this way?". (Ans.: yes, I could.) Shorter me: Verstehen, bah!

On enjoying bad books: "When I think of my comfort re-reads they all tend to be things where everything comes out all right in the end—children’s books, romances, and military stories. The characters in these sorts of books tend to be justified in what they do. There’s a certain black and white nature to everything. They tend to be series, so I can really soak myself in them, or if not series then at least a lot of books to the same formula... The other thing they have in common is that while the prose might be clunky, the characters might have only two dimensions and the plots when examined may be ridiculous, they’re really good on the storytelling level. They may look contrived when you step away from them, but while you’re immersed, you can care. Indeed, you’re allowed to care, encouraged to care. They’re manipulative in some ways, but you feel that the author is buying what they’re selling, they’re button-pushing, but they’re honest. They’re the author’s buttons too. ..."

Using the case of an author with a known pseudonym to test methods for establishing identity of authorship. Conclusion: it may be that <

Text classification PRECISION FAIL

The morphology of the folk-tale of our time.

Towards a genealogy of the supervillain.

I actually found this looking for more stuff by Moretti, but some of the references look like they might make teaching fodder.

You guys are not making it any easier for me to maintain my favorable stance towards evolutionary psychology, y'know? (Among everything else, "altruistic" != "egalitarian".)

Via absfac, whose comments I echo: "I care very little about the specific complaint re: the contemporary pop comics market but the categorization of fictional narratives for men seems astute." (Actually, I can think of "Hill"-type comics, such as Berlatsky says are missing, but I'm too embarrassed to list them, and anyway I have no idea how popular they are.)

Scott McLemee remembers John Leonard.

"(a) Those that are best-sellers, (b) those that were assigned to you in school, (c) those that you feel you have already read even though you have not, (d) classics, (e) those that are not read as the author intended, (f) those that many intend to read “some day,” (g) fantasy trilogies, (h) those that are otherwise not flawed, (i) those that were written on manual typewriters, (j) those that can be judged by their covers, (k) those that were padded by their designers during production to appear longer than they are, (l) those that are only called ‘novel’ by courtesy, (m) those that have been condensed by Readers Digest, (n) those that look well upon the shelf."

"what makes a writer wake up screaming? Bad plots"

"The decline of things that I like has its roots in societal changes that include the increase in things that I don’t like."

Surprisingly, she does not mention Achilles.

"arguably the most horrifying series of books I have ever read. It has a hero I can't stand, politics so strong they're comical, and sex scenes that are downright horrifying. And I cannot stop reading it. I am going to buy every single one, and if Ringo e

"Which means, of course, that the typical 'realistic' novel is not realistic in showing us a fictional analogue for what's actually in the world, it's realistic only in replicating the kinds of mistakes the naive observer makes in looking at the world."

George Scialabba on Edmund Wilson

"Here is what I’m going to do: I’m going to argue that story tellers and readers have seen our planet — ever since it first became visible around 1750 — primarily through the huge range of tales of the fantastic that I’m here calling fantastika."

"they have brought whores for Eleusis" as an expression of the Keynesianism of fools