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justforbooks · 18 days

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The American novelist John Barth, who has died aged 93, was a noted evangelist for experimental fiction, beguiling his readers with complex stories within stories.

He claimed as his patron saint Scheherazade in the Arabian Nights, the vizier’s daughter whose tales, spun out for 1,001 nights, entranced King Shahryar: “The whole frame of these thousand nights and a night,” Barth said, “speaks to my heart, directly and intimately – and in many ways at once personal and technical.”

He came to notice with his third novel, The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), a riotous mock-epic pastiche that drew upon a satire of American manners of the same title published in 1708 by one Ebenezer Cooke.

Reviewers compared the book to Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, and enjoyed Barth’s rollicking use of coincidence, parody, farce, sentimentality and melodrama. It was much-hyped – “One of the greatest works of fiction of our time,” said the writer and artist Richard Kostelanetz – but Gore Vidal found Barth’s humour to be laboured: “I could not so much as summon up a smile at the lazy jokes and the horrendous pastiche of what Barth takes to be 18th-century English.” Other critics complained of its excessive length, narrow emotional range and an underlying facetiousness in Barth’s tone.

His next novel, Giles Goat-Boy (1966), brought Barth critical and commercial success. It was a mythology drenched campus novel, complete with cold war allegories and self-reflexive narratives, 766 pages long. Barth’s penchant for addressing political, religious and philosophical issues gave his novel a flavour of seriousness that was widely praised. Vidal, however, called it “a book to be taught rather than read”.

The following year, Barth published The Literature of Exhaustion, a manifesto for literary postmodernism, in the Atlantic magazine. The traditional forms of representation were used up, he argued. There were too many contemporary writers who went about their business as though James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Samuel Beckett and Vladimir Nabokov had never written. Barth’s impatience with most fiction and his eloquent enthusiasm for the experimental caught a moment in contemporary culture. He became the poster boy for postmodernism.

One of the three children of Georgia (nee Simmons) and John Barth, who ran a sweet shop, he was born in Cambridge, a small crab and oyster town in Maryland, and grew up amid the flat, low-lying tidal marshlands on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay.

His twin sister was whimsically named Jill, and Barth’s family knew him as Jack, a source of teasing during their schooldays.

After graduating from high school, Barth enrolled in a summer programme at the Juilliard School of Music in New York. An enthusiastic jazz drummer, he hoped for a career as an arranger, but at the Juilliard he encountered some seriously talented performers and his ambitions shrank.

Instead, he enrolled at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, to study journalism. He remained at Hopkins to complete a master’s degree, and in 1953 landed a job in the English department at Pennsylvania State University, where he remained for 12 years.

Barth’s first published novel, The Floating Opera (1956), was a traditional first-person narrative about boozing, desire and nihilism on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake. The End of the Road (1958), described by the critic Leslie Fiedler as an example of “provincial American existentialism”, was a darker novel about a grad-school dropout, ending with an abortion. Some of the more gruesome details were cut at the insistence of his publishers, but restored when the novel was later reissued.

In 1965 he took a job teaching at the Buffalo campus of the State University of New York, where he remained until 1973. During that time of student unrest, the campus was repeatedly occupied by local police and troopers of the National Guard. Barth was less sympathetic to the protesters than some of his colleagues, but he wholeheartedly threw himself into the trashing of the practitioners of “traditional” fiction such as John Updike and William Styron, whose work he felt was a literary dead end.

Under the growing influence of Borges and 60s counterculture, Barth turned away from fat pastiche-novels to short fictional forms. Lost in the Funhouse (1968) was a melange of short fictions for print, tape and live voice, which he staged on campuses across the nation. In 1973 he returned to Johns Hopkins to take up a chair of creative writing, and stayed until retirement in 1992.

By the 80s, the frisky, postmodern self-consciousness that had made readers sit up in the 60s had lost some of its capacity to shock. It had gone, within a generation, from being a great cause to a routine, a shtick. Barth’s books increasingly needed to be explained to readers, and sales fell away. Complex, self-referential novels such as Chimera, which shared the National Book Award in 1973, the epistolary Letters (1979) and Sabbatical (1982) were seen as working out the implications of The Literature of Exhaustion.

In 1980 he revisited this essay with The Literature of Replenishment, in which he repented his youthful scorn for the 19th-century novel as practised by the “great premodernists” such as Dickens, Twain and Tolstoy. If, as the modernists asserted, linearity, rationality and consciousness are not the whole story, argued Barth, “we may appreciate that the contraries of those things are not the whole story either … A worthy program for postmodernist fiction, I believe, is the synthesis … of these modes of writing.”

Barth’s essays were collected in three volumes as The Friday Book (1984), Further Fridays (1995) and Final Fridays (2012). A further collection of short nonfiction pieces, Postscripts, was published in 2022. Once Upon a Time (1994), with its teasing promise of tall tales, was his most autobiographical novel. Coming Soon!!! (2001), with its references to The Floating Opera, showed that the old postmodernist playfulness was unquenched.

In 1998, Barth won both the Lannan Foundation’s lifetime achievement award and the Pen/Malamud award for excellence in the short story.

He married Anne Strickland in 1950 and they had three children, Christine, John and Daniel. The couple divorced in 1969 and the following year he married Shelly Rosenberg. She and his children survive him.

🔔 John Simmons Barth, writer, born 27 May 1930; died 2 April 2024

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

#just for books #John Barth #in memoriam

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copperbadge · 1 year

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Hey Sam! I’ve been rereading some of your older MCU pieces (and leaving more kudos when able) and I wanted to tell you specifically how much I love Exclusive. Love a good outsider perspective, the perfect long-form journalism pastiche, and the delightful twist at the end. Thanks again for your writing!

Aw, thank you! (And thanks for the kudos!) I had a ton of fun with Exclusive -- I love a good outsider POV as well, and it's a good chance to practice....I'm not even sure how to put it, because the author is not an unreliable narrator exactly, but he doesn't have the full story so he sometimes comes off as unreliable because we know more than he does. Unreliable narrators fascinate me and I'm very bad at them, so any chance to give it a swing.

And the twist ending is one of the few times I've ever been able to pull off a surprise like that -- I'm constantly delighted by peoples' reactions to it!

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forthegothicheroine · 8 months

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authors self rec! When you get this, reply with your favorite five fics that you've written, then pass on to at least five other writers. Let’s spread the self-love❤

Thank you! I tried to narrow it down to one pick per fandom:

The Dream Journal of Lucy Westenra: An account of Lucy's ordeal from her perspective, and a bit of a response to all the critics arguing she asked for it. (Read the tagged warnings here!)

Flora's Adventures in Ghostland: A pastiche of Alice in Wonderland where Flora from The Turn of the Screw ventures into the underworld to get brother back. Featuring a gothic heroine rendition of the Gashleycrumb Tinies!

Et in Arcadia Ego: The missing folk horror episode of The Prisoner. The new Number Two has plans that are a bit more Midsommar than A Clockwork Orange, with clues to my personal interpretation of the show's finale.

Sir Wishbone and the Bad Day: What if Wishbone did a retelling of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight? I think this is one of my best in terms of actually getting the canon feel right.

The Mel Brooks Cameo in Twin Peaks: Exactly what it says. Inspired by Mel Brooks's account of working with David Lynch on The Elephant Man, and wishing they'd continued their partnership.

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the-garbanzo-annex-jr · 11 months

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With much fanfare, the Biden Administration recently unveiled a plan that supposedly aims to counter anti-Semitism in America. Several “mainstream” American Jewish organizations fell over each other, racing to be first to distribute their press statements praising the Biden paper. I differ.

I live in various worlds including those of the secular legal profession, opinion journalism, and academia. I also know the American Jewish organizational universe from the inside. Among the many in that alphabet universe of ADL’s and AJC’s and XYZ’s, each has its own publicists, and they all race to get their press release out before “the competition” does. Their dream: maybe, if they are fast enough and say the words coveted by the leftist mainstream media, their organization’s name will be cited and their leader will be quoted, wistfully in the New York Times. Or at least in some left-wing “Jewish” outlet like the JTA, the TOI, or Haaretz.

So they all rushed out their praise for Biden’s Balderdash.

In truth, the Biden document on confronting anti-Semitism is a sham, a fraud, and the first insult came in its timing. The day it was published, traditional Jews hurriedly were absorbed in their last-minute preparations to observe the Biblical holy festival of Shavuot, which began that evening. American Jewish mainstream organizations exposed their own inadequacies by their prioritizing praising Biden’s 60-page document that they barely had read when Jewish priorities instead demanded they focus on welcoming that evening’s Shavuot festival. While I was awake all night learning Torah and munching on cheesecake, they were awake all night waiting with bated breath for the next day’s newspapers: would they be quoted?

Even deeper, I was disgusted once I did read the paper and saw how little Biden really offered in his plan to “combat anti-Semitism.” Two main points:

Black and White

The Democrats and their mainstream media, academia, and other “progressives” — the Woke — absolutely refuse to speak the truth about Black anti-Semitism and Muslim anti-Semitism in America. Perhaps the overwhelming majority of American Blacks and even some American Muslims like Jews. If so, that’s nice. We all should like each other. I like them. But there is no question that a great many Black opinion makers are toxic, poisonous Jew-haters: Ilhan Omar, Alice Walker, Louis Farrakhan, Kanye West — and all of “Black Lives Matter.” Plenty, plenty of others.

As for Muslims, Jew-hatred on college campuses stems greatly from campus Muslim groups and their self-hating J Street-type allies. In New York City, the keynote student speech at the CUNY Law School graduation was a pastiche of venom, lies, and hate. Yet the Biden document assigns chief blame for anti-Semitism in America on White Supremacists.

When Democrats and The Woke manipulate anti-Semitism to beat up on their preferred targets, they insult Jews and all other Americans of conscience. Anti-Semitism is not a White problem. Yes, disgusting haters do exist among discrete pockets of Caucasians, but they are summarily rejected. Condemnation of White Supremacist anti-Semitism has meaning only when it also acknowledges the breadth and depth of Black Jew-hatred in America. Jews who identify openly and proudly as Jews know Black anti-Semitism first-hand. They are its targets not only in the public sphere but in the inner cities because they easily are spotted by their more distinctly Jewish garb — yarmulkas, tzitzit, black fedoras, Hasidic attire, modest dress, and the like.

The liberals and “progressives” who raced to praise Biden on Shavuot Eve for his “Sop to the Jews” do not live among People of Color. They live in lily-White neighborhoods with the Gavin Newsoms and Nancy Pelosis, and they send their children to lily-White secular private schools to keep them away from the BIPOC minorities (except Asians) over whom they preen with their “charitable” virtue signaling.

The Jonathan Greenblatts who head the likes of ADL are more interested in bolstering Obama Democrats and defending despicably wicked evil mongers like George Soros than they are in fighting the defamation of Jews.

The ADL’s Greenblatt was an Obama White House official. When Obama’s eight years expired, Greenblatt was imported into ADL to bring the Obama Agenda into an organization that had been founded to defend Jews a century earlier as Leo Frank was being lynched in Marietta, Georgia. Meanwhile, the new head of the American Jewish Committee, Ted Deutch, is a partisan lifelong professional Democrat and was a Democrat Congressman for twelve years from 2010-2022. Before that, he served four years as a Democrat Florida State Senator. Now he speaks for the AJC in praise of Biden. That is the mindset of such “Jewish” organizations.

And don’t ever forget: Between 30-40 percent of the people in America who say they are “Jews” in fact are not Jews but are the children of intermarried non-Jewish mothers who express their “Jewishness” by putting a Jewish star on their Christmas trees and boycotting Israel.

The paradox is that, behind the curtain, these secular “progressive” Jewish groups and their leaders are in chaos. Their children are marrying out of the faith in droves and rearing non-Jewish grandchildren. Donald Trump has more Jewish grandchildren than most of them do. They have lost almost all their influence — as Jews. As a result, those Jewish groups watch as anti-Semitism grows more severe in their own political backyard among the Left, pervades university campuses they once attended and still moronically support as alumni, and now even becomes institutionalized in the Left’s latest authoritarian putsch: DEI — “Diversity, Equity, Inclusiveness” — under which less qualified but politically correct chosen intersectionalist groups are pushed to the front of the line while Jews are cast aside.

Biden’s paper does not address any of this.

As a result, colleges and graduate schools are admitting fewer Jews than ever before. Not since the 1930’s-1950’s have so many Jewish applicants to colleges been turned away because their identity failed to comport with the prevailing race-based admissions quotas. Jewish students who get admitted face ubiquitous anti-Semitism, as American campuses curiously have converted the country of Israel to a surrogate for Apartheid South Africa. If the “N-word” once was the noun of bigoted hate, today it is the “Z- word”: Zionism.

Today’s Campus Woke harbor no complaints about human rights in China, Russia, North Korea, Cuba, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and various parts of Africa. Only Israel is their bane: her Western freedoms and democratic institutions, her technological successes, her survival surrounded by a sea of Muslim terrorists who lose more ground every time they launch a war against Jews.

Biden’s words offer no meaningful plan to stop the Jew-hatred on campuses. His special advisor on anti-Semitism, Deborah Lipstadt, has proven useless. No promises to defund campuses that normalize Jew hatred. No forthright condemnation of the “BDS” scheme of Jew hatred. For that, it falls on White Christians in Arkansas to take the lead in supporting Israel.

And that brings us to the document’s second major glaring failure: the very definition of anti-Semitism.

The Definition

Today’s Left has embraced the subterfuge of attacking “Israel” and “Zionism” instead of “Jews.” So if someone Woke says “That guy is a cheap, miserly, hook-nosed Zionist,” he-she-they-it-whatever then follows with “I am not against Jews, just against Zionists.”

Uh-huh.

As a result, a simple definition of Jew-hatred was drafted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) that actually is quite inadequate. But it includes useful examples of Jew-hatred. Some of them make the point that it is anti-Semitic when someone attacks Israel and Zionism based on a standard not applied to any other country. Think of the likes of George Soros and Squad types like Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and Ocasio Cortes. Think of Ben & Jerry and Betty McCollum and Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.

Biden was implored by all the Jewish groups to adopt that IHRA definition. He balked. Instead, his 60-page paper acknowledges three different definitions of anti-Semitism, two of which allow for Jew-hatred disguised as “anti-Zionism.” It is a joke.

So he promises to expand Holocaust education? Has anyone noticed that the more Holocaust education there is in America, the more anti-Semitism there is? When bad people are educated that Jews are easy to murder in the millions, maybe that is not so effective. Better to educate them on what Israel did in 1967 and still does every so often when they decide to eliminate six terror leaders in a week.

There is no better way to gauge Biden’s words than by his actions. The Democrats had been enamored with Israel through her first thirty years when Israel was governed by coalitions of Labor Party socialist Marxists like David Ben-Gurion, Yitzchak Rabin, Moshe Dayan, Golda Meir, and Shimon Peres. Those days are over. Menachem Begin’s election in 1977 as Israeli prime minister heralded a political earthquake, and the country now is majority center-right. Several polls predict the socialist Marxist Labor Party may disappear in the next elections. As Israel has moved from socialism to capitalism, and from left-wing woke policies to greater respect for conservative family values and religious tradition, Democrats have abandoned Israel in many significant ways, while Republican conservatives and Christians have embraced her.

So the same Joe Biden who issues a paper on anti-Semitism amid fanfare on Shavuot eve simultaneously has found other opportunities to single out the country’s two most vile Jew-haters in Congress — Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar — for praise whenever the opportunity arises. His paper even massages the Jew-hatred of CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, making those Jew haters seem like allies in the fight against anti-Semitism. He continues negotiating a deal with Iran. He interferes with Israel’s internal debate over judicial reform. He tells Israel they may not build a yeshiva in Chomesh. He won’t meet with Bibi until Bibi genuflects to his orders. George Soros’s son has visited the Biden White House at least seventeen times.

Ever since the emergence of Donald Trump on the American political scene, anti-Semitism has been wielded by the Left as a cynical tool with which to club political opponents, often shamefully and dishonestly. Thus, they had the audacity to tar the most pro-Israel president in American history, Donald Trump, as an anti-Semite, while they make excuses for George Soros, Bernie Sanders, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and the rest of The Squad.

Biden’s insulting release of his paper is not worth the paper it is written on. Amid all its highfalutin’ publicity, it does absolutely nothing. It is a sop and an insult to American Jews. And the ridiculous race to praise this meaningless document further apprises the Jewish community of the state of the “American Jewish leadership” that speaks in its name.

#antisemitism #joe biden #jewish organizations #sham

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cmrosens · 9 months

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Snippet from The Reluctant Husband

if anyone fancies a 1930s Lovecraftian pastiche in journal format, with implied weird tentacle sex, gnarly experiments, body horror, and a no-nonsense eldritch maid called Deirdre who won't give up the secrets of her otherworldly flesh unless she's wifed up first, try this: buy.bookfunnel.com/kcfqxb88e1

#books books books #cosmic horror but sexy #tentacles #writeblr #writers on tumblr #pagham-on-sea #cosmic horror #eldritch horror #pagham on sea #fiction #body horrror #body horror

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fecklessgreebobastard · 3 months

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all I can recall from my first manic episode: a post therapy session catharsis

CW: brutal honesty about bipolar disorder, depression, mania and psychosis. think prozac nation.

the hardest question to answer is ‘describe your manic episodes’. it’s not that everything has faded into obscurity, i can remember the sequence of events just well enough to recount it. but it wasn’t me who noticed the abnormalities, more those around me. like all of the mania that followed. the first was my dad, he noticed that something was off, that my eyes dilated and that i talked with a sense of reassurance unknown to my personality. to me, it just felt like things slowly warped and shifted ever so slightly until fantasy was the new normal. the frame tilting over time. like a swimming pool that’s freezing when you jump in but you slowly adjust to the temperature.

the timeline changed in 2016. something that i feel like happened to the whole world and not just myself, although i’m not a reliable narrator. we collectively became more polarised. the US election. cringe compilations. rise of the alt right. an arms race of words on apps that we used to post our coffee on. pokémon go. dat boi. regardless, something definitely shifted for me, and things have never felt quite the same since. grappling with new lenses that weren’t rose coloured.

i was already on the camhs waiting list. that spring, a girl in my class who i’d known since childhood asked me ‘are you depressed?’ she had recently taken a year out because she was. i said i didn’t know. my grandpa had just died and the melancholy that had silently consumed me for years was getting harder to conceal. i came home and told my mum, my lips were still too sealed for the whole truth but it seemed to do the job at opening up.

summer 2016. fire island. it was a family trip. i would spend most nights scribbling disordered thoughts into my journal. it felt like my only friend that summer was that little black leather notebook and the late amy winehouse. i would stay up all night watching her on youtube and feeling like we had some parasocial connection. i addressed my diary to her for a while. i remember squeezing a stone to the point it drew blood in the palm of my hand most days. because nothing felt real and i needed something to feel real. to bring me back. a splash of cool water. i’d walk down beaches in the blazing american summer which should’ve made a brit like me sweat. but i did not feel the heat. completely disconnected from the outside world. all i would be thinking about was converting to judaism so my life would have some meaning. ruminating. obsessing. obsessing again and again. an erratic grasp to pull myself out the trench.

things came to a head in september. one night i completely broke down, malfunctioned to my parents about how much i had come to resent the life i lived. my dad played me lou reed’s berlin. after that night, i only left my bed to get four teeth removed, they said i was brave, something i was getting too used to. i stopped going to school. catatonic for months. the first of many. camhs weren’t much help, i told the psychiatrist that i only lived for fear of disappointing people. she looked like i had grown devil horns and left the room in terror. i think she thought i was beyond her level of expertise.

eventually i got a script of fluoxetine so i would leave my bed. i felt relieved. like it was gonna make things better. but i was so so wrong. around that time i had bought a typewriter in camden market. the writing i did in my depression was disturbing, but coherent. i remember a detailed and morbid description of everyone’s individual reactions if i died. after i took the pills, these pieces of writing would become less and less coherent. random letters smashed in. a pastiche of beat poetry with zero intention.

my band had a gig. i was playing bass. dad took a photo that made my nerdy fourteen year old self look a little like sid vicious. i think it was the dead eyes, the indignant scowl on my face. ‘one day, i’ll be up on stage on glastonbury, headlining, and they’ll all regret how they treated me’. this statement seemed so blasé in the moment i said it but i came to find out that the newfound arrogance was a red flag. i thought i was the reincarnation of ziggy stardust. someone who never even existed. bought bird skeletons off the internet. stopped sleeping.

in my mind, nothing was real. i crashed into solipsism. believing the world was nothing more than an illusion. a development from squeezing rocks. i remember seeing tears run down my dad’s face as he tried to convince me of reality. i thought that i was invincible but i didn’t know for sure and assumed the only way to prove it was to jump in front of a car or cut a body part off like van gogh. ‘something isn’t right’. and i couldn’t even tell.

one morning, my parents found me after a night of no sleep. in the kitchen at 5am. i was hunched over the stove, attempting to make a lava lamp using oil. some weird scheme i immediately needed to follow through on. they bundled me in the car and drove to camhs. i have zero recollection of what i said in the appointment but i remember the psychiatrist telling me ‘we think you have bipolar disorder, we’re going to start you on an anti psychotic’. i burst into tears, screaming that this was the most creative i had ever been and they were gonna take that away from me, unaware that i would go on to write better songs. she told me that i was not these people i idolised. i was not brain jones. i was not amy winehouse. that i could live longer than both combined if i got the right help. i kicked and screamed, yet three days later i was fainting in the shower after my first dose of aripiprazole. i had to miss the pierce the veil gig that night.

the year is 2024. i am 21 years old. i have just finished telling the bits and pieces that i can recall to my shrink. i come back to the room but i am not all there. ‘can you feel your feet? the way they’re touching the ground. are they hot or cold?’ she says. whiteboard. light switch. computer monitor. clock. and a green chair. five things i can see. the dissociation is still there but not thumping. it is no longer the pirate that controls the helm. she tells me ‘say out loud that you are safe here’. ‘i am safe here’. and today i choose to believe i am. i want to believe i am.

#bipolar disorder #bipolar #digital diary #greebo #prozac nation #mental health awareness #mania #depression #psychosis #mental illness #manic #2016 #free writing #writing #vent art

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jewfrogs · 1 year

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Heyo! Your posts about Greek myths not being fanfiction (excellently said ) but also that retelling have roots and reasons, how would you class the percy Jackson series, could it be fanfiction about the myths? And how would you class very loose retellings of myths, for example Uyllesse Dies At Dawn the album by The Mechanisms?

hello! that post seems so ancient to me, it’s wild that it’s going around again…..

i don’t disagree with anything i said, but i wish i’d drawn more on fan studies scholarship (remember that this is a subject of real, meaningful academic study!); nonetheless, what i wrote is similar to what seems to be the disciplinary consensus. the introduction to the fan fiction studies reader understands fanfiction as “historically situated in the last forty years, tending to respond to a specific form of media texts, and encompassing a specific amateur infrastructure for its creation, distribution, and reception.”[1] i would argue that these parameters are definitional, the pillars that make fanfic fanfic. i don’t believe fanfic can be fanfic without intention—that is, it’s not fanfic if you don’t know you’re writing fanfic.[2] ripping fanfic out of this framework deprives the form of meaning.

the works you mention are adaptations, which are another beast entirely.[3] linda hutcheon places adaptation alongside “imitation, allusion, parody, travesty, pastiche, and quotation as popular creative ways of deriving art from art”[4]—we might add fanfiction to this list. it is another way of deriving art from art, a way which happens within these “amateur infrastructures” of fan communities, which responds to a source with work inspired by and dependent on that source,[5] which is produced by and for fans and within fandom. fanfic occupies spaces that original fiction cannot. thus something cannot simultaneously be original fiction and fanfiction; they are mutually exclusive.[6]

re: greco-roman mythology specifically, i feel like we can safely say that this has been sufficiently absorbed into the social milieu as a “cultural universal”—to borrow a phrase from john djisenu[7]—that drawing on/responding to something so broad and ubiquitous is far distinct from writing a story about the characters and occurrences and settings of, say, one singular book series (with a single author, owner, publisher, etc.). classics are everywhere. classical adaptations, in various forms, far predate fanfic (and, in almost all of those forms, their aims and efforts are very, very different from fanfic). these are simply not the same. ask yourself: could someone post this on ao3? if not, it is not fanfic. rita dove would not post the darker face of the earth on ao3. it is not fanfic.

i appreciate your asking! have a delightful day! (footnotes under the cut)

[1] karen hellekson and kristina busse, the fan fiction studies reader (iowa city: university of iowa press, 2014): 7.

[2] i don’t mean this as any sort of moral maxim—people may write what we might call fanfic without knowing the word fanfic, such as a 7 year old writing a story where the my little ponies hang out with her, but overwhelmingly knowledge (and readership) of fanfic precedes production of fanfic. people who write fanfic are always aware that they are writing derivative, transformative fiction spun out of other fiction.

[3] with their own academic discipline! there is lots of literature in adaptation studies; as a sampler see thomas m. leitch (ed.), the oxford handbook of adaptation studies (oxford: oxford university press, 2017) and the oxford journal adaptation (started in 2008).

[4] linda hutcheon, “on the art of adaptation,” daedalus 133, no. 2 (2004): 109.

[5] this is not to diminish the artistic merit of fanfic, which can undoubtedly be beautiful and may be appreciated outside of its origins (i’ve read and loved my fair share of friends’ fic that i know nothing about), but it is naturally unable to stand alone; there is no fanfic if there is nothing to write fanfic about.

[6] this is why we see the phenomenon of “filing off the serial numbers” when people want to publish fanfic as original fiction; the work must be stripped of its nature and repainted to pass as something it is not. (this is also why that practice is only possible with fanfic that wasn’t very good to begin with—good fanfic is strongly rooted in its characters and canon [whether or not it is compliant with that canon].)

[7] john djisenu, “cross-cultural bonds between ancient greece and africa: implications of contemporary staging practices,” in lorna hardwick and carol gillespie (eds.), classics in post-colonial worlds (oxford: oxford university press, 2007): 72.

#ask #anonymous #yeagh.....putting footnotes in the [tumblr] posts.....this is always where this was going to go #ALSO another interesting angle is fanfic as a specifically unlicensed counter-copyright practice #i think the essay textual poachers by henry jenkins is good on that

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milkstoner · 7 months

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journal entry for today,

My prose reads like thousands of little ribbons unraveling so very sweetly. Every thought is something smooth; if you dipped your fingers into them, they would ripple iridescent. This morning, on my way to university, I took a look at the grass, which was vibrant green, and I marveled at each little sparkle pearling on each little strand, like beads of blue morning sunlight. This is where the divine sleeps. Holy water. I crack my fingers, I render them supple. I remember my mother saying the most beautiful hands she had seen belonged to one of her children, me; I remember my siblings’ cousin telling me I got my hands from who he believes is my grandmother. I remember, when my mother told me my father was somebody I never knew, asking her about my hands, where they come from, and she told me they came from her. My height comes from my father. My hair comes from my father. My eyes come from my father. My lack of soul comes from winter.

Judith declared that God manifested Himself through her hands, the hands of a woman.

My fingers are always so cold and stiff and trembling. They crave gentleness, warmth. They are repulsed by unwanted touch. My fingers are sacred. When I offer my hands, I offer one of the layers of my intimacy. It is a gift. I want to present my hands, give them up to be caressed and admired. A kiss on the knuckles, easing into trust. I want to hold with this subtle tenderness, this supple caress, because I want to hold much sweeter than I behold. I want someone to take notice, how the moon-kissed sunlight shines so bright on my hands and renders them translucent. How my touch is fleeting, how it carries my calligraphy, my craft, my muscle memory, and how it writes itself on its most longed for surface, a loved one’s skin, like my prose, like thousands of little ribbons unraveling. so very sweetly. How water drops from my nails after washing. This is where the divine sleeps. Holy water. Counterculture—it’s contradictory.

I went to day camp at the museum when I was thirteen, obsessed with Lana Del Rey and Marina and the Diamonds. There was a bitchy little gay boy who hated on everybody; he said of me that all he liked were my hands. An odd but still cherished backhanded compliment. From May of 2022 through June of 2023, I slept next to a lonely and miserable man to whom I offered my hands; he rejected them on account that they were cold. The temperature of his body was always so warm and welcoming, but his spirit and muscles recoiled from my touch. I stuck my hands between my thighs.

All that emits light is holy, and all that takes on a circular shape is mystical. I own forty CD’s. I especially like eating from a bowl. My favourite metro station is Peel, with all of its circular ceramics by Jean-Paul Mousseau embedded into the walls and floating floors. Witches work best in circles because women’s histories operate in cycles. Circular shapes are infinite. Women summon from them. The moon is eternal. Street lights are her daughters. Grapes are the sweetest fruits, blueberries are angels. Ladybugs are feyries, and those who carry exactly seven dots wear the burden of Mary’s sorrows. Eyes own, seize, and possess. They are simultaneously window and mirror, a paradox. A classmate of mine told me my eyes were baroque. My eyes are empty. There is only one path, and it leads to the ferris wheel.

I always watch my step, and I’ve just seen a butterfly resting on the sidewalk; I kneeled right then and there, because catching such an ephemeral creature immobile is the rarest experience. Lace fabric is a pastiche of the wings of a butterfly; it tries to replicate the delicately carved veils and their perpetual apotheosis; what it can’t emulate is the hypostasis, that of weightlessness. This butterfly, she was beautiful, showing off her wings for me and letting me take note of the purple bleeding into orange, which reminded me of myself, and of October by James Tissot, which hangs on a lilac wall at the museum. It reminded me, also, of the leaves turning copper; as she lay there, shining her brightest, iridescent, waiting for someone to step on her, she served as a memento mori. Nature morte.

#anaïs nin is my mother david byrne is my father #personal #obvi but idc #might delete however

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mitchipedia · 11 months

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Adi Robertson at The Verge:

Last week, generative fiction tool Sudowrite launched a system for writing whole novels. Called Story Engine, it’s another shot in the ongoing culture war between artists and AI developers — one side infuriated by what feels like a devaluation of their craft, the other insisting that it’s a tool for unlocking creativity and breaking writer’s block. Neither answered the question I was really curious about: does it work? Well, I didn’t take on Sudowrite’s pitch of a full novel in a few days. But over the weekend, I generated a novella written entirely inside Story Engine — it’s called The Electric Sea at the AI’s suggestion, and you can read the whole thing on Tumblr. I’m not sure how I feel about it. I’m an enthusiastic, if strictly amateur, fiction writer. I wrote somewhere north of 150,000 words of unpublished fiction last year, so Sudowrite’s “break writer’s block” pitch isn’t that compelling to me. Writing, however, is not a task I hold inherently sacred. The field has a long and proud tradition of hastily written profit-driven trash, from Ed Wood’s churned-out erotica to the infamous pulp publisher Badger Books, known for handing authors a cover and asking them to write a book around it. I enjoy seeing where large language models’ strengths and weaknesses lie, and I’ve long been fascinated by challenges like NaNoGenMo, which asked writers to create an AI-generated novel in the days before modern generative AI. So on Saturday morning I paid for 90,000 words of Sudowrite text, booted it up, and “wrote” a roughly 22,500-word cyberpunk novella by Sunday afternoon.

One of my favorite novels deals with the world of “hastily written profit-driven trash:” “Derby Dugan’s Depression Funnies,” by Tom DeHaven, about a hack writer in the 1930s who churns out pulp stories and comic strip text. I wrote about it here. (“_Derby Dugan _is a wonderful novel,” I said. “I like to re-read it every few years to revisit a time and place where a kid in a yellow derby with a talking dog can make a writer a star of an enchanted New York.” Which reminds me that I haven’t re-read the Derby Dugan trilogy in some time.)

Robertson:

Writing is a pastime I enjoy, and it’s led me to a lot of fascinating places, even when the end result won’t be sold or even read by anybody else. I’ve taken up entire hobbies and vacations for research purposes. I like devising a good turn of phrase or exploring a character’s motivations. I enjoy feeling like I’ve done something a little unexpected or, conversely, like I’ve written a spot-on pastiche of a style. I don’t care about an AI “replacing” me the way I don’t worry about an industrial knitting machine replacing my handmade shawls — the process is the point.

I need to think about that. I started my journalism career on daily newspapers, where I loved doing weird things that I would not do on my own initiative: playing paintball, flying in an ultralight aircraft, or—in college—going out with the campus police on an all-night ridealong. I talked with a lot of strange characters too. Tech journalism and marketing is a great career, but I miss miss that other thing.

Spoiler: Robertson finds the software writes a barely passable, mediocre, cliched cyberpunk novella. I think she’s being charitable. I think it stinks—but I’m not a cyberpunk fan. Still, it’s a functional novella, she says.

I find the same thing with ChatGPT, when I’ve tried it on articles. It’s bad, like SEO spam. But there’s demand for SEO spam.

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ultraviolet-ink · 10 months

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Hi hi, I've never done an ask thing on tumblr before so sorry if I do it wrong somehow, lol. ~

I was going to get caught up on your long fic tonight but AO3 is broken, so instead I'm going to gush about how much I've been enjoying it so far! I have just a couple chapters left until I'm caught up, and I'm stoked to read them as soon as I can! I absolutely adore your writing style, it's been such a pleasure to indulge in.

I feel like you've captured the characters so well in your writing. Absolutely love seeing how you've portrayed Mikotoba's many conflicting feelings. When I was playing the game I was like, okay but I need to see more of exactly why he left Japan and what that was like, and you've captured exactly what I wanted so well! Reading about his journey to London was so much fun, and I've loved seeing him develop even more as he's gotten more accustomed to being there! And watching his relationship with Sholmes progress has been such a delight. And ahhh the letters from back home! And baby Susato! I love them!

I've finally been getting around to reading the original ACD stories and seeing all the references to them has been so much fun. I love love love reading the cases you've been including in the stories, but the little domestic day to day journal entries are delightful as well!

I can't wait to read more and see how the story progresses further. Thank you so so so much for your writing, I desperately wanted fanfics after finishing the games and this fic has not disappointed! So stoked to see where it goes next! ^u^

Oh my goodness, thank you so much for this!! <3 This is an absolutely lovely ask to wake up to, you are absolutely too kind, thank you so much! :D I was definitely in the same boat as you were when I decided to start the fic, I really wanted to explore why Yujin would leave when Susato was so young, and especially how it affected him! From what we see in the games, he really does care for her greatly, and is quite doting to the point where he would literally help her break the rules lol! He's such an interesting character to me, especially since we don't get to see much of him until close to the end of TGAA2. Part of the fun for me is all the research that I've been able to find! I'm a big fan of day to day life, especially when it makes you realize "wow, these were just people, they had their errands and they had games, and they got bored too!", makes you think that you could easily be friends with someone from well over 100 years ago, and I really find that beautiful! Baby Susato's pastiches are also some of my favorite parts to write too haha! I get really excited for her birthday chapters because I get to show her growing up <3 ACD canon is so great, I love it a lot (obviously lol XD), and it's been a fun challenge to diverge from them! My personal favorite is The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton because of how evil and smarmy the villain is (and, unlike Moriarty, he manages to get a name drop in the title...! That's how you KNOW he's someone you shouldn't take lightly) Thank you once again for your lovely and thoughtful ask, it's truly humbling, and I legitimately can't stop smiling omg omg omg! <3 I'm really happy that you are enjoying my fic so much, and like you, I hope Ao3 gets back up soon!

#ask #fic ask #thank you so much for this omg!#you are too kind <3

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justforbooks · 6 months

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The novelist AS Byatt, who has died aged 87, was throughout her existence a victim of Samuel Johnson’s “hunger of the imagination that preys incessantly upon life, and must be always appeased by some employment”. In the words of one of her own heroines, whatever in the moral abstract she thought about the relative importance of writing and life, nothing mattered to her more than writing.

Her first novel, Shadow of a Sun, appeared in 1964, the year after A Summer Bird-Cage, the first novel by her sister, Margaret Drabble, was published, thus establishing the notorious and possibly exaggerated rivalry between them. It was followed by studies of Iris Murdoch, of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and by another novel, The Game (1967). In 1972, she endured the death of her 11-year-old son, Charles, knocked down and killed by a car. The experience marked her deeply. She continued to teach and she sat on committees, but for a decade the creative springs were dried up in her. There is no compensation, she said to interviewers who asked about such compensations, for the death of a child – except that if you survive, you’re a bit tougher. But it taught her about the machinery of grief.

Her creative career started again in 1978 with The Virgin in the Garden, the first of what would prove to be a remarkable tetralogy of novels, and a long, complex narrative of a small community and its school in Yorkshire celebrating in the coronation year of 1953, the start of a new Elizabethan age.

To some extent the creation of fiction had become necessary to her as a complement (or antidote) to her teaching work at University College London, as a kind of private gesture against an excessively theoretical academic environment. It was evident, she wrote acerbically, that what writers there were in the 1970s were not coming out of English departments: it therefore seemed better not to go into one.

The Virgin in the Garden was well received, and was followed by Still Life (1985), which included the chance death by electrocution of one of the main characters from the first novel, and an emphasis on the accidental element in human life and death.

Her reputation (until then, that of a literary novelist with slightly intimidating intellectual qualifications) was transformed by the publication in 1990 of Possession, which was to win the Booker prize and become a slightly surprising bestseller worldwide, and, in 2002, a film.

A rich and capacious combination of 19th-century letters, poems, fables and journals, all contained within the apparently orthodox setting of a modern literary detective novel, it was the book in which her exhilarating genius at last came into its own. Publishers in Britain and America, who had contemplated in appalled respect the prospect of selling a novel containing large swatches of pastiche Victorian poetry, were triumphantly refuted when sales of the book – even before the award of the Booker and Aer Lingus prizes – soared. It had seemed until then, to quote one review, that her fiction was to be characterised by a luminous bookishness that stayed artistically inert.

She was a self-confessed intellectual, and this earned her a bad press in a country in which the word was a term of denigration. Possession elbowed this image aside by adding vitality and comedy to literariness, and excitement to erudition. The wells that had been sealed up for so long were now flowing with unexpected abundance.

The book brought together elements in her background that had lain fallow until then, and provided pointers to the way her writing was to develop in the future. In it, in an extraordinarily rich mixture, are to be found her fascination with Victorian fiction and poetry, her childhood absorption in myths and fairytales, her interest in the sheer mechanics of storytelling; in it also are to be found her insatiable thirst for knowledge, her love for subtlety and complication in her plots, an increased assurance in her use of humour, her satiric view of the more exploitative aspects of the academic industry, and her growing mistrust of literary biography as a genre – described by her as “a bastard form, a dilettante pursuit”. This mistrust was something she was to explore more extensively in a later novel, The Biographer’s Tale (2000).

The publication of Possession released an unbelievable flow of creativity. Books came bursting out, notably Angels and Insects (1992), which was filmed in 1995, and, later, The Children’s Book (2009), shortlisted for the Booker. “I think I wrote them in a kind of joie de vivre about being a full-time writer instead of walking through the streets thinking about students and lectures,” she said.

Another aspect of her talent that was unexpectedly unleashed during the 1980s and 90s was the short story. It is rarely the case that writers who are at ease in what has been described as the big baggy novel are also adept in this very different and extremely demanding form.

Byatt was able to cope with equal ease with the 2,000-word story and the 20,000-word novella. Her first collection, Sugar and Other Stories (1987), dealt with bereavement, ghosts, memories of her childhood, her father; in it, for the first time, she wrote in The July Ghost, a story based on her own grief at the loss of her son. It was a kind of clearing of the decks. Later stories carried on from where Sugar left off, building on the concentrated, painterly and tactile prose she had developed there.

One of the most typical was A Lamia in the Cévennes, written for the British Council’s New Writing series. In it, a painter who has abandoned London for the Cévennes mountains of southern France finds a lamia – a mythological creature, closely modelled on Keats’s lamia (a “palpitating snake… Her head was serpent, but, ah, bitter-sweet! She had a woman’s mouth with all its pearls complete.”) – in his swimming pool. This pool bears a striking resemblance to the one Byatt had built for her house in the village of Av��ze in that region with the prize money from Possession; the hero is trying to capture the different blues and different surface planes that his pool confronts him with:

He muttered to himself. Why bother. Why does this matter so much. What difference does it make to anything if I solve this blue and just start again. I could just sit down and drink wine. I could go and be useful in a cholera-camp in Colombia or Ethiopia. Why bother to render the transparency in solid paint or air on a bit of board? I could just stop.

He could not.

He tried oil paint and acrylic, water-colour and gouache, large designs and small plain planes and complicated juxtaposed planes. He tried trapping light on thick impasto and tried also glazing his surfaces flat and glossy, like seventeenth-century Dutch or Spanish paintings of silk. One of these almost pleased him, done at night, with the lights under the water and the dark round the stone, on an oval bit of board. But then he thought it was sentimental. He tried veils of watery blues on white in water-colour, he tried Matisse-like patches of blue and petunia – pool blue, sky blue, petunia – he tried Bonnard’s mixtures of pastel and gouache.

His brain hurt, and his eyes stared, and he felt whipped by winds and dried by suns.

He was happy, in one of the ways human beings have found in which to be happy.

It was her way too. Her love of the fine arts was deep and scholarly, and is apparent throughout her work, most notably in her Portraits in Fiction (2001) and Peacock and Vine (2016), on William Morris and the designer Mariano Fortuny.

Born in Sheffield, Antonia was the eldest child of John Drabble, KC and judge, and his wife, Marie (nee Bloor). She described her childhood as having been greatly blessed by very bad asthma, and when later in life she came to read Proust, she recognised certain things in him – “a contemplative, acute vision, induced by keeping very still in order to be able to breathe, a sense of living most fiercely in the mind, or in books, which were a livelier life”. If she was fortunate in her asthma, she was also fortunate in belonging to a family that took books and reading for granted.

She remembered three colouring books that she was given at the age of four, each with a page of poetry beside a picture. The poems were The Pied Piper and Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott and Morte d’Arthur, and she quickly had all three by heart, a suitable foundation for a writer who was to be so influenced by the Victorian age. Later, she lost herself in a tangled maze of myths, folktales, legends and fairy stories, and found in them another world beyond the (to her) limited and boring world of childhood. Most importantly, she quickly recognised and understood the vital importance of storytelling.

Her early immersion in myth found its outlet much later in her career, when she was invited to contribute to Canongate’s series of retellings of ancient myth. Her own novels, as she pointed out, had threads of myth in their narrative that were an essential part of their form.

It was inevitable that, in choosing which to retell, she should turn back to one of the most influential books her mother had given her in her childhood, Wilhelm Wägner’s Asgard and the Gods, and rewrite Ragnarök (2011), “the myth to end all myths, the myth in which the gods themselves were all destroyed”. Written in the persona of a child living in a time of world war, when human beings seemed bent on destroying the world they had been born into, it provided ample ammunition for metaphor and irony, as well as some beautiful writing: “Wind Time, Wolf Time, before the World breaks up. That was the time they were in.”

The second world war very soon removed her father temporarily from her daily life. However, her mother, who had been an early graduate of the English school at Cambridge but had been forced to give up teaching when she married, took it for granted that children needed to be supplied constantly with poetry and with books.

Life in the Drabble household was something of an intellectual hothouse with a highly competitive element: all four children were expected to excel. Antonia and Margaret’s younger siblings, Helen and Richard, became, respectively, an art historian and a KC.

Antonia was educated at Sheffield high school and the Mount school, York, and later at Newnham College, Cambridge, where she took first-class honours in English, at Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania, and at Somerville College, Oxford.

In 1959, she married Ian Byatt and had a son (who died in the accident) and a daughter; in 1969, they divorced, and she married Peter Duffy, with whom she had two daughters. She taught in the extramural department of London University (1962-71) and the Central School of Art and Design (1965-69), and in 1972 became full-time lecturer in English and American Literature at UCL (senior lecturer in 1981). She left the college in 1983 to write full time.

She was conscientious in taking on administrative chores that many writers baulked at, and gave service on many committees, notably the Kingman committee on English language (1987-88). But the appointment that perhaps fed most directly into her interests was on the board of the British Council and its literature advisory panel.

Throughout her career she was, like many writers, a tireless traveller; unlike some, she was generous in acknowledging the benefits she gained from her travels, which she undertook not just to sell herself, but to learn from other writers and readers. She began writing short stories, she said, because of lectures she was given about the superiority of the short form by writers in China and Russia. But her interests were essentially and intrinsically European, and her intimate knowledge of European literature, past and present, also fed into her work.

She could read easily in many languages, which made her a natural choice as a judge of the first European literature prize, when it was established in 1990; it was while reading for it that she discovered the work of writers such as Roberto Calasso, Javier Marías and Bernardo Atxaga, for whom she formed a lasting enthusiasm, and did much to enhance their reputation in Britain.

She was also remarkable for her generosity to younger writers. At a stage of her career when she might well have been excused for finding her own professional commitments a sufficiently heavy workload, she read new work voraciously. Her floorboards cracked under the load of novels and poems sent to her by writers and publishers who valued her approval far above that of reviewers. She could not possibly have read all of them, but she read an astonishing number.

She was appointed CBE in 1990 and made a dame in 1999. Devoted to her family, she was much absorbed in the future of her children and grandchildren. But beyond every other attribute, she had a genius for friendship. In this relationship, all her qualities came to the fore: her imagination, her creativity, her ability to communicate, her steadfastness, and above all her generosity.

She is survived by her husband and daughters, Antonia, Miranda and Isabel.

🔔Antonia Susan Byatt, writer, born 24 August 1936; died 16 November 2023

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#just for books #AS Byatt #in memoriam

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