Interesting Things Found on My LJ Listserve (FLIST)

[shadowkat]

1. From SmartBitches.com. An animated film short by an animator who was let go by Disney, which is simply beautiful:

Watch on YouTube

2. Kristen Cashor, a YA author, posts in her blog (which I'm getting on a feed to my lj), about various essays regarding YA novels.

The gist?

One of the most amazing and depressing things about this continual "adults shouldn't read YA" crap (and there are so many amazing and depressing things) is the unquestioned assumption that adults should be above the concerns of young people, that we have nothing to gain from the concerns of young people (other than nostalgic memories of our own innocence). That if it's for young people, it can't be sophisticated enough for adults; it can't be art; it must be less. Yes, the debate devalues women; it devalues fine authors and their work. But most infuriating is the devaluation of girls and boys. Read the Ursu article. It has so many good parts. And please, please pass it on.

Before I say anything else? YA debate aside, one of my pet peeves is folks telling me what I should read, write, watch, listen to or draw for pleasure or outside of work. Or worse, judging it. That's my time. For me.

I'll bloody well read/watch/listen etc what I damn well please. You may recommend, suggest, or even preview - but if you snootily tell me or judge me for what I'm doing in my spare time? Because it happens to be something you don't like or think is beneath you? I'm going to rip you a new one. Don't mess with my pleasure reading/watching folks. And the best way to keep me from reading, watching what you suggest is sneering at what I like.

Seriously? If you love daytime soaps? Watch them. If you like documentaries on PBS, if that floats your boat? Have a field day. If the Bachelor or the Bacherlorette makes you happy - have fun! IF Breaking Bad is you love? Enjoy. Same with Twilight,
The GoldFinch, 50 Shades of Grey, or American Psycho. One of the lovely things about freedom of speech, a free press, is we can do that. But please please please remember that if you want the right to love what you love, write what you write, draw what you draw, speak what you speak, you sorta kinda have to tolerate people loving what you hate, saying what you despise, etc. Grin and bear it. Comes with the territory. The problem with free will and rights? Is everyone has them.

What a lot of people fail to perceive is they aren't the leads in the play, there are no lead actors in this play - it's an ensemble cast. Your opinion, I'm sorry, does not rule. It's just one little voice in a vast sea of voices. The internet certainly makes that point apparent.

Ahem. Sorry. End Rant. Like I said. Pet Peeve. Big time.

Cashore posts links to the following essays:

* Read Whatever You Want but You Should Feel Embarrassed if What You Read Was Meant For Children by Ruth Graham - okay, the title alone gave me pause. Seriously, hon, you do realize spreading that amount of negativity out into the world is only going to bite you in the butt right? [Here's a bit of advice - do not disparage what others read, or put it down, or sneer, because it will only bring you misery in the long run. Sure it's all fun and games now. But, trust me on this - having uh been there, done that - the universe is a bit of a jokester, sooner or later you will find yourself on the opposite side of that argument, with someone sneering down their nose at you. Plus you never know what cool person you just offended.

Ruth Graham did not make many friends with that article. And probably lost quite a few readers.

*The Death of Adulthood in American Culture by A.O. Scott - which defends the Graham article, but doesn't appear to understand any more than Graham does why people read or watch for pleasure.

*
Henry James and the Great YA Debate While I'm admittedly not a fan of Henry James (it's the writing style - reading it feels a wee bit like trudging through the mental equivalent of quick sand - keep in mind I read the mental equivalent of quick sand for a living, so why would I do it for pleasure?),this essay was interesting. It responds to both Graham and Scott's essays, not necessarily agreeing with either. [Oh, warning to The Goldfinch fans on my flist, the essayist is not a fan of that novel. But does use it rather well to make a few key points.]

Here's a few snippets:

James himself was familiar with the argument that good novels were, for the most part, simple, accessible works that could be spoiled by too much “literary analysis.” In his 1884 essay “The Art of Fiction,” one of the first and probably still the best assertion of the novel’s status as high art, James noted that “literature should be either instructive or amusing, and there is in many minds an impression that … artistic preoccupations, the search for form, contribute to neither end, interfere indeed with both.” He adds that many readers who would otherwise disagree about what exactly makes a novel good would “all agree that the ‘artistic’ idea would spoil some of their fun.” But James would have none of this. Behind every great novel, he insisted, there exists some theory of the novel, however unspoken. “The successful application of any art is a delightful spectacle, but the theory, too, is interesting,” he wrote. “And though there is a great deal of the latter without the former, I suspect there has never been a genuine success that has not had a latent core of conviction.” It was also in this essay that James expressed what is still the best response to ninety-nine per cent of all conversations about literary genre: “There are bad novels and good novels, as there are bad pictures and good pictures; but that is the only distinction in which I see any meaning.” He was responding to a complaint that was made even about his early work—that there was too much character and not enough incident, and that this made it inferior to the work of Dickens or Trollope, who wrote the kind of inviting, event-packed novels whose return Grossman celebrates.

[Somewhat off topic: The statement in bold is in a nutshell why I chose to go to law school as opposed to grad school in English Lit. Well amongst the many many reasons, the other was an inability to learn another language. (Ironic that - in order to effectively teach at the university level, English Lit, you had to have at least two other languages.) There's nothing more likely to kill one's love of reading than over-analyzing it. Much safer over-analyzing numbers. Plus it pays more or so I'm told. Personally, I think I should have gone the psychology route, but under-grad scared me off of it - bloody behaviorists.]

We must grant the artist his subject, his idea, what the French call his donnée; our criticism is applied only to what he makes of it. Naturally I do not mean that we are bound to like it or find it interesting: in case we do not our course is perfectly simple—to let it alone. We may believe that of a certain idea even the most sincere novelist can make nothing at all, and the event may perfectly justify our belief; but the failure will have been a failure to execute, and it is in the execution that the fatal weakness is recorded.

[AND]

The ideally handsome way is for him to multiply in any given connexion all the possible sources of entertainment—or, more grossly expressing it again, to intensify his whole chance of pleasure. (It all comes back to that, to my and your “fun”—if we but allow the term its full extension; to the production of which no humblest question involved, even to that of the shade of a cadence or the position of a comma, is not richly pertinent.)

-from Henry James essay "The Art of Fiction".

[Exactly. It's about fun. ]

* How to Tell IF You Are in an Essay On Adulthood basically makes fun of the above three essays - which ahem, sort of deserve it. And prove my point about how critiquing others reading habits is likely to bite you in the butt. Although, I admittedly liked the Henry James essay.

*And finally, On Poisoned Apples and the Great YA Debate by Ann URSU - This is written by a YA novelist and mother. (In short, an adult with small children, who actually reads and writes these for a living.) Cashore states you can read this one without actually reading the others, I don't think that is necessarily true. Ursu clearly didn't read The New Yorker article on James all that carefully - or she'd have figured out that it was actually critiquing Scott and Graham, and more or less agreed with her. Granted I had to read a few passages twice to figure that out - Beha writes like James, around things. There's something to be said for simple clear diction in writing. Dense writing requires a lot more attention and is more likely to be misread. Of course, everything can be misread...as I've learned repeatedly this week. You really can't win, can you?

At any rate - Ms. Ursu is understandably enraged by the previous essayists. Scott to be fair isn't really targeting YA readers, so much as shallow and somewhat juvenile blockbuster movies and man-child comedies aimed at 30 something males. (His words, not mine.) And Beha, the James essayist, is stating that part of the problem with YA is how it is marketed, a lot of it is actually fairly adult, but the publishers market it to a younger audience. Which is a valid point. Also, I'm sorry, but YA is written in a simpler more conversational style - it's not as dense. (But so too were Ernnest Heminway's novels. James like flowery prose, Hemingway was a minimalist. Most YA tends towards minimalism. Some are beginning writers who spent a bit too much time at Lolly, Lolly, Lolly buying adverbs. This isn't misogyny or chauvinism. Men and women write YA. Heck Edith Wharton writes like James. ) So, I'm not sure I completely agree with the feminist slant of Ursu essay. But I understand it - AO Scott annoyed the heck out of me too, and I couldn't read Graham. Both writers proved my point - regarding how you have to be careful about making broad statements like:
"Adults should be ashamed of reading works meant for children" (seriously, considering the number of great literary works written for children taught at the university level - that's a bit ill-advised in of itself. (Huckleberry Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird, Lord of the Flies, David Copperfield, Treasure Island, Catcher in the Rye, A Separate Peace, Member at the Wedding...just to name a few.) ) or "The Death of Adulthood in American Culture" (honestly? That's as silly a statement as the Death of the American Novel. People tend to forget how limited their perception is. To say such a thing, you'd have to have read or viewed everything out there - which is impossible. Generalizations really do make us look like idiots don't they?)

Comments

[petzipellepingo.livejournal.com]

And Beha, the James essayist, is stating that part of the problem with YA is how it is marketed, a lot of it is actually fairly adult, but the publishers market it to a younger audience. Which is a valid point. Also, I'm sorry, but YA is written in a simpler more conversational style - it's not as dense. (But so too were Ernnest Heminway's novels. James like flowery prose, Hemingway was a minimalist. Most YA tends towards minimalism

Exactly. There's nothing wrong with reading either children's or YA novels, they are frequently funnier and better written than adult novels.

And frankly, reading anything is a good thing. Cereal boxes, the sides of buses, etc.

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

People can be very silly about things.