First, thanks for the virtual flowers, Clark & Lex! And the sweet things from svmadelyn's lovefest -- they are much appreciated, so much so that I am going to work on my Lex/Lana story on the Metro and see if I can't get it done soon. In the meantime, I have over 30 books in the hopper, so I'll work on the backlog, starting with some nonfiction: ( Why Do Men Have Nipples, New Media, and Who Owns Culture? (three books) )

ETA: LibraryThing now has a "completist" section on its stats page, so you can see what authors are likely to inspire collections -- that is, if you own one book by that author, you probably own several books by that author. Scroll down to see; coffeeandink in particular might be amused by the results.

Unless you really want to read detailed thoughts about three academic books on copying and plagiarism, don't go beyond the cut tag -- though I have put in a few fandom-related things when they seemed relevant. This is really more for my reference than anything else (hey, cesperanza, I think you gave me these titles). ( This is why God invented cut tags. )

Even if you don't usually read book reviews, if you or anyone you love gardens (or eats meat), read this.

Richard Rhodes, Deadly Feasts: The "Prion" Controversy and the Public's Health: This is possibly the scariest book I've ever read. Transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, which you've probably heard most about in its guise of mad cow disease, is a disease that literally eats holes in the brains of its victims, killing them in a terrible fashion. We know how it spreads: it spreads through cannibalism and through eating animals that have been made into cannibals by modern food production techniques. It gets into the brain and starts converting normal proteins into agents of death, like Vonnegut's ice-9 converting regular water into an unmelting solid, through a process that may be the same as crystallization (which you might have done in high school chemistry, turning a supersaturated solution into a solid by dropping a seed crystal into the liquid). The agents that cause TSE's spread are virtually impervious to heat, radiation, formaldehyde, years of isolation, and freezing. And, even with the example of Britain, which ignored the problem for years until the infection was firmly established – and at what level, we still don't know, because infections began in the early 1980s and the incubation time can be 2-3 decades – America is taking the same ostrich-like stance, refusing to fund testing and even preventing ranchers from testing in some circumstances. Rhodes tells the medical detective story, starting with the epidemic of kuru among New Guinea cannibals in the 1950s and 1960s through modern understandings of TSEs, and along the way delivers a powerful indictment of government unwillingness to act in the face of a profitable production mechanism. I'll leave you with a bit of advice you may want to pass along, a quote from the book:

"You know the bone meal that people use on their roses?" Gajdusek asked me then. "It's made from downer cattle [cattle that sicken and die for no apparent reason, which sometimes are infected with TSE]. Ground extremely fine. The instructions on the bag warn you not to open it in a closed room. Gets up your nose."
The Nobel-laureate virologist who knows more than anyone else in the world about transmissible spongiform encephalopathy looked at me meaningfully. "Do you use bone meal on your roses?"
I told him I did.
He nodded. "I wouldn't if I were you."

( other nonfiction )

What is Scully thinking? Help me caption this, win valuable prizes.

Also, lots of nonfiction reviews.

(For those of you looking for fan stuff, I am writing. I've just been having trouble sitting down with any one story.)

( In the meantime, I read )

We went to see The Black Pirate tonight. Douglas Fairbanks was quite charming, though the stylized acting of silent films doesn't generally appeal to me. The film was only slightly gay: there was a great moment when Fairbanks traps his pirate friend – who's about to bring some food in to the beautiful captured princess – against the wall, with one arm on each side, and asks the friend if he believes in love at first sight. The audience reaction was massive, which gives further credence to my theory that, in a couple of decades, this period will be identified as the period in which homosexuality became part of American culture, in the sense that feminism is part of American culture – a major, acknowledged, but not uncontested, force.

In which I ramble about four books: ( Read more... )

With thanks to Z. for the title.

I reread an old favorite, David R. Palmer’s Emergence, last night and something occurred to me. (Not as good as I remembered, but we’ll get to the review in a bit.) When we talk about Mary Sues, we treat them as if they represented some aspect of female writers, a visible sign of feminine ecriture. But men write Mary Sues too, not just Marty Stus, and men also can identify with them.

Emergence’s Mary Sue is named Candidia (Candy) Smith-Foster. Unusual given name, hyphenated last name – though Smith and Foster are pretty nondescript; I wonder what the names were before Palmer’s editor got to them. Anyhow, Candy is a genius, and, at 11 years old, a competent paramedic and a Sixth Level black belt, among other things. She’s also deeply bonded to an animal, to whom she refers as her retarded baby brother. People tell her she’s pretty, and going to grow into beautiful, throughout. I don’t know what color her eyes are, but I wouldn’t be shocked if they were violet. She drives, she flies, she saves lives; she does everything short of pureeing. That simpering Lt. Piper is a tyro; Candy is Mary Sue. Written by a man, and enjoyed by enough SF fans to get Palmer Hugo, Nebula, and Campbell award nominations for two of the short stories that, with additional sections, make up the novel.

It’s still a decent read, though nowhere what I thought it was when I was a kid. (By contrast, Gateway still grabs me, whatever you want to say about the sequels.) The story is a variant on a post-holocaust narrative; Candy survives biowar that killed everybody else, or so she thinks. She finds out that she’s a Very Important Person. Though the plot depends on so much coincidence that not one deus ex machina but an entire pantheon and some backup demigods are required, the writing is engaging and Candy is, in fact, charming. This is why people can get to like Mary Sues, especially if they’re not interfering with what you thought the story was supposed to be about, i.e. other characters about whom you care more.

Consider also that Heinlein, the sf man’s sf man, created Podkayne of Mars, indubitably another Mary Sue with her precociousness, her odd name, and her beyond-her-years wisdom. Carol Clover’s excellent Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film argues quite persuasively that male viewers identify with female victims in horror films, particularly the Final Girl – and in the modern horror film, it’s always a final girl who defeats the monster/madman, not a boy – in ways similar to what I’m arguing about male readers’ potential identification with Mary Sues.

What may be different is that, as Clover argues, the Final Girl is invested with masculine or at least gender-blurring characteristics. She often has a male-sounding name (Marti, Stretch, Ripley, Stevie, Will, Joey, Max, etc.). She is sexually chaste, as compared to the other young women around her, who all die horribly, often while seeking, having, or just having had sex. This may serve to mitigate a straight man’s anxiety at identifying with someone whose social status is, according to her sex, to get fucked. The young age of Candy and Podkayne serves a similar sexuality-diffusing function, though notably Candy does talk a lot about her duty, in the near future, to help repopulate the world.

By contrast, women’s Mary Sues often get laid, and how. Perhaps this is because identifying with a woman/girl who’s as competent in bed as she is at everything else is less disturbing for straight women than for straight men. On the other hand, Mary Sues in slash stories generally don’t get laid, though they are generally rewarded with the delicious imaginings of two hot men screwing one another. Where’s the female author’s identification there? The reader’s? Better theorists than I have tackled that one. The point, to the extent that I have one, is that men aren’t necessarily identifying with the men in fiction any more than women necessarily identify with the women, even if the men have a gender privilege that seems to make male-identification the most ego-boosting strategy for both sexes. There’s pleasure in transgression, even if you’re already on top.

While I’m here, let me tell you about Eric Garcia’s Matchstick Men (soon to be a major motion picture starring Nic Cage, according to the dust jacket). I picked this up because I mildly enjoyed Garcia’s two previous novels about a private eye who’s part of a modern dinosaur culture. All the dinos hide behind human suits. It’s a clever concept, and he does a good job with it. Anyhow, Matchstick Men is a basic con-man story, well-executed. For spoilery reasons, I ended up feeling queasy about it, because one decent character comes to a rather bad end, but if you like capers and don’t mind which Westlake or Block you get (the funny one or the grim one), this book may be for you.

I’m not competent enough to set up a poll, but I’ll answer questions like every other lemming if you send them to me. I’d certainly like to meet more of the people who, for whatever twisted reasons of their own, read this journal, and the questions might be a neat way to do that.