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Sort of a con-txt report
First: Asexuality prompt fest!
I will be hanging around there as soon as I get my head together enough. Losing most of a week to brain-destroying heat has left me feeling completely off-kilter in terms of writing and otherwise accomplishing stuff (I'm about twenty pages behind on the kinkmemes I'm already keeping up with...) On the other hnad, I've been reading real books! (Easier to handle in hammock than laptops are, see.) Apropos of that:
Dear Mr. Leonard R. N. Ashley, who wrote "The Complete Book Of Werewolves" that I picked up from the con.txt swap table:
I am used to books about the paranormal and anomalistics, especially ones about "savage monsters", having at minimum a fairly high level of passive background racism (along with fairly high levels of ablism and often misogyny and classism), but this one was toddling along being reasonably okay, if extremely and smugly idiosyncratic, when suddenly, *pow*, right in the face. Repeatedly. (The 'politically correct literature' rant was only the start :/ )
I would like to state for the record that the books I left on the con.txt swap table were books I actually liked that I happened to have extra copies of, or not enough storage space for, or to have left the fandoms of. Unlike apparently nearly everybody else who left books, who appeared to be clearing their libraries of authors who had proven to be homophobic/racist/misogynistic/pedophilic and/or copyright hypocrites. (All that Card and Bradley and Gabaldon and Heinlein and Bear and etc, it was like a nostalgia trip through the last two years' worth of fail.)
...Oh, and while I am at it,
*I have not actually read Moon Dance by Somtow, or any of his other work; it's possible it's a very good book, but Ashley's description somehow did not give me confidence.
I will be hanging around there as soon as I get my head together enough. Losing most of a week to brain-destroying heat has left me feeling completely off-kilter in terms of writing and otherwise accomplishing stuff (I'm about twenty pages behind on the kinkmemes I'm already keeping up with...) On the other hnad, I've been reading real books! (Easier to handle in hammock than laptops are, see.) Apropos of that:
Dear Mr. Leonard R. N. Ashley, who wrote "The Complete Book Of Werewolves" that I picked up from the con.txt swap table:
You invited people to talk about your book on the Internet, so I think I'll take you up on it.
While I generally agree with you about the terrible state of the American educational system today, I have some objections to your statement that American schoolchildren ought to "tackle Henry James' The Turn of the Screw instead of reading Alice Walker's The Color Purple and other politically correct assignments."
Speaking as a young(ish) American who tackled both of those books in school (though neither as an assignment), Turn of the Screw is not actually a particularly good novel. It is, in fact, a fairly standard Gothic novel that has had all of the actually interesting elements of Gothic novels taken out, so that it can pass as proper men's literature. If you would like to read some good, serious gothic novels that are stylistically excellent, fun to read, and have serious things to say about both the genre and the state of humanity, I recommend Austen's Northanger Abbey or Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Oh, wait, those were both written by women, so I suppose that would be too "politically correct".
As for The Color Purple, I will grant you that, particularly in terms of pacing and structure, it has a certain lack of polish. On the other hand, it's an absorbing book that takes risks, tries things that had almost never been done before, says things that nobody else was trying to say, speaks to people nobody else was speaking to, and does it all very, very well, if not perfectly. I am sorry if there was not enough girl-on-girl, racism and gore in it for your tastes (per your previous recommendation of Moon Dance*, with its lesbian cowgirls and savage Sioux tribesmen.)
Also I am not entirely sure why you felt the need to make that comparison in the middle of what was ostensibly a survey of werewolf literature, but I am sure you had your reasons.
Kisses,
Melannen
P.S.: I am actually working on a lesbian werewolf novel myself (scattershot and very slowly, but I am), since con.txt - two years ago? Four years ago? I forget - when one of the mods in a panel about original writing said that she was still looking for the first Great American Werewolf Novel, as she'd never seen one. I suspect it won't have enough girl-on-girl or racism for you, either.
I am used to books about the paranormal and anomalistics, especially ones about "savage monsters", having at minimum a fairly high level of passive background racism (along with fairly high levels of ablism and often misogyny and classism), but this one was toddling along being reasonably okay, if extremely and smugly idiosyncratic, when suddenly, *pow*, right in the face. Repeatedly. (The 'politically correct literature' rant was only the start :/ )
I would like to state for the record that the books I left on the con.txt swap table were books I actually liked that I happened to have extra copies of, or not enough storage space for, or to have left the fandoms of. Unlike apparently nearly everybody else who left books, who appeared to be clearing their libraries of authors who had proven to be homophobic/racist/misogynistic/pedophilic and/or copyright hypocrites. (All that Card and Bradley and Gabaldon and Heinlein and Bear and etc, it was like a nostalgia trip through the last two years' worth of fail.)
...Oh, and while I am at it,
Dear Mr. R. D. Schneck, author of 'The President's Vampire', which I acquired a few days after con-txt,
You seem to be a great and true anomalist and Fortean - I, too, have the shelf of old childhood paperbacks about strange things and weird happenings, only mine has grown to fill an entire bookcase and well beyond. Your book was great - I was so happy to see an anomalist book that covers in-depth stories I'd never seen in anything but passing mention. The story about the Springheel Jack of Southwest Baltimore was an excellent thing to read in the middle of a Baltimore heat wave! And thank you so much for doing the original research and being willing to say it, outright, when a beloved Fortean case comes to nothing - too many people working in Fort's tradition want to skip the 'verifying facts' step, and your chapter on the Vampire was almost a case study in how it should be done. We need more Forteans like you writing, in general.
But I do want to let you know that on the list of things that will never, ever be interesting from a Fortean point of view (along with "things I found out through past life regression" and "metaphysics as explained by a TV psychic") is "things that happened to my friends while they were playing with a Ouija Board." There were some interesting things in the story - the question of how the board works, and who it works for, and trying to get verifiable (or provably false) data from it, and the psychology involved - but all of that stuff is only peripherally related to Forteana, and it certainly didn't justify "things that happened to my friends while playing with a Ouija board" being the longest section in the book. If it had been paperback rather than hardcover, I would have done what I've done to several other books on my paranormal shelf - slit the binding, removed the useless section that was most of the book, and then re-taped the binding.
This is disappointing mainly because the rest of the book was as close to a perfect Fortean ouvre as I've encountered in ages. Keep writing! Just leave out the Ouija boards next time, okay?
Kisses,
Melannen
*I have not actually read Moon Dance by Somtow, or any of his other work; it's possible it's a very good book, but Ashley's description somehow did not give me confidence.
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/rant
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I'm a far cry from being an expert on Gothic myself (my few forays into the genre have taught me that it's just not something that appeals to me as a genre) but ambiguity and unreliable narrators are a hallmark of gothics; I think James in Turn of the Screw may have been being more, hmm, self-conscious about it? Going "Oh, hay, look at the cool stuff I'm doing with unreliability!" instead of just, you know, writing an unreliable narrator as part of the storytelling.
...and books that have commentary on "innocence" and "childhood" were probably most guaranteed to make me want to throw them at a wall, when I read them on the cusp of childhood myself, regardless of what the argument was. There's almost always an "othering" of children there, looking on them as not-people, that is really off-putting to me, not to mention being bad storytelling and flat characterization.
I'm not saying Turn of the Screw isn't a good novel - it's got some good parts, and James is certainly fun to pull apart in literary analysis terms, probably because he wrote with that in mind - but there are plenty other novels, even ones of the same time, that would do just as well, but don't get to count as "literature" because their authors didn't get by the gatekeepers. ETA: And a lot of my dislike of TotS in particular is that it really is an example of taking tropes of a women's literature and making them valid by having a man write them. I think my long history of eyerolling at "totally not a fantasy novel"s and "totally not a romance novel"s hitting the bestseller lists/NYT review columns predisposes me to have very little patience for that, even if the writer is doing awesome things.
(Back to the old question of the value of a 'literary canon'. I'll note though that my English classes read novels by people who weren't dead white men not out of political correctness, but in order to game the AP tests - writing your essays on books the scorers hadn't seen fifty times before and gotten very bored of was, our teacher claimed, guaranteed to raise your score at least 10%.)
...oh, wait, Britten wrote a "Turn of the Screw" opera. No wonder you're defending it. :P
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You've got me there. I did come to the story through the opera--and honestly I still prefer the opera because, well, it has music, and Henry James' prose strikes me as oddly impenetrable--but having read a couple of books on each since then, I think both the book and the opera have a lot to say.
(You have a very good point about the portrayal of children, which I need to think more about. The children in Britten's opera seem more real to me, in part because they get to speak with their own voices whereas in the story they're mediated by the governess and how she chooses to tell their tale. But Britten was probably even more obsessed by innocence than James, so, yeah...)
When it comes to the literary canon, I guess I dislike the notion that it operates on a one-in-one-out model. While the gates of the canon need to be opened much wider, I prefer to think of it as being extended rather than moved completely. Because I have gotten quite a bit out of the dead white men even though I'm neither dead nor a man.
(Obviously there are limits in terms of how much you can teach in a typical class, but this just means that teachers will have more options to choose from.)
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Oh, and I agree about opening the gates wider and not taking things *out* - even if a particular canonical work has no inherent redeeming value whatsoever (unlikely), taking it out of the canon also reduces your ability to understand all the later parts of the conversation that built on it, which may be much more valuable. Being able to have the conversation is why we need a canon in the first place.
I'm just ... wary of versions of "widening the canon" that mean "letting things in all the way around the edges, thus keeping the dead white straight men centered". There have always been other conversations going, too - why not let the dead white 'literary' people be the edges, and center those sometimes instead?
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Hah, true.
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"Love" I don't use lightly, "sincerely" and "thank you" which are my usual closings are too, well, sincere. "Kisses" always works!