You Mean All Is Not Lost?

According to the NYT...well, according to the NEA, as quoted and written about in the NYT, more people are reading literature (defined for these purposes as fiction/poetry/drama) for the first time in 26 years. Quoth NEA chair Dana Gioia: "Cultural decline is not inevitable."

Is there an actual turn back in the direction of reading? If there is, what does it mean? Has the Harry Potter generation reached an age at which they can be sampled as part of the 18-24 demographic, and if so, might this mean that a single reading phenomenon can have a measurable impact on the reading practices of an entire demographic cohort?

Or maybe everybody's just reading more books. Which I think is great, especially if they add mine to their lists.

Skeptical Toward Theory

Paul Kincaid begins his latest Science Fiction Skeptic column at Bookslut with the following:

I am, as Adam Roberts would delight in pointing out to me, an amateur of science fiction. That is, in terms of this criticism lark, I am not an academic. This does, however, have its advantages. It means, for example, that I do not have to accept the various shades of critical theory as monolithic belief systems. I can, rather, take them as toolboxes into which I might dip as the fancy takes me to find whichever device happens to work in terms of any particular text. Now I know that this mix and match approach would have Leavis and Frye and Derrida spinning in their graves, but it can bring some interesting results.

As a working academic, I would like to contest a couple of presuppositions that lie behind Kincaid's introduction.

One: Using various theories as toolboxes from which individual devices might be applied as they are found useful is the standard way that theory has been taught in every single class I have ever been a part of, either as student or teacher. I have no idea where the idea comes from that an individual must pledge him- or herself to a particular theory. Individual scholars may believe that certain theories have more relevance than others, but I've never heard of anyone who insists that literary texts must only be read through a single theoretical lens.

Two: Although Leavis was certainly a demagogue for a particular mode of reading, he was also not a theoretician. His positions were in fact fundamentally anti-theoretical, which makes him a strange namecheck. Ditto Frye and Derrida, although for different reasons, since both were great (and self-proclaimed) synthesizers of previous scholars all the way back to Aristotle and Plato. Both of them believed they had hit upon important insights having to do with the nature of narrative (Frye) and language (Derrida), but neither of them (especially Derrida) would have insisted that theirs was the only way to read.

Whatever these quibbles, I enjoy the column, and I'm glad Bookslut keeps devoting space to genre literatures and comics.

Man, There Are Some Good Stories in Here

And I'm not even talking about mine. Because of a shipping snafu, I just got my copy, and it was worth the wait:

2pm: The Real Estate Agent Arrives by Steve Rasnic Tem
Even the Pawn by Joel Lane
Last Man by Mick Scully
Unlucky by Lisa Morton
Appearances by Murray Shelmerdine
101 Ways to Leave Paris by Simon Avery (novella)
People in Hell Want Ice & Water by Nicholas Stephen Proctor
Black Lagoon by Alex Irvine
Your Place is in the Shadows by Charlie Williams
Saudade by Darren Speegle
The Montgolfier Assignment by Kay Sexton
The Opening by Daniel Kaysen

Phoenix Article Up

Ah, bylined in the Phoenix again. This is a cool project; it'll be interesting to see how it all turns out.


In other news: a drop-dead date for finding out whether we'll ever see Watchmen?

Other Alex Irvines

A fascinating array of namesakes, gathered during a heroic bout of procrastination:

The Fighting Parson
The Lairds
The Botanist
The Lord Chancellor
The Designer
The Photographer
The Other Photographer
The Ceramic Artist
The Ophthalmologist
The Wrestler
The Bulb Grower

Pavel Datsyuk is All Kinds of Awesome

Excerpts! Get Your Excerpts!

I retooled the sidebar so a couple of long-dead links now live again. Also, there are now links to excerpts from A Scattering of Jades, The Narrows, and One King. The Jades link is to Google Books, which has a 55-page selection from the book. I know that as a writer and staunch defender of intellectual property rights I should be up in arms about this, but actually I think it's pretty cool. I wish the excerpt from The Narrows was the actual beginning instead of Chapter 1, but there you go.

Does anyone know where stories that used to be up on SciFi.com live now? For a while I thought someone was hosting them, but the last couple of times I've tried to go there, the page wouldn't load.

News from F&SF

According to the magazine's blog, they're going bimonthly. As a longtime fan of and contributor to F&SF, this makes me a little sad even though the page count isn't going to differ significantly after this year. Whatever Gordon needs to do--and he seems bullish on the move in the blog post--the field needs him and it needs F&SF. Maybe that makes me old-fashioned. A post on io9 today speculates about whether the profusion of anthologies has shifted SF's center of short-fictional gravity in that direction, and away from the magazines. I hope not. I like getting magazines, and I'd like to continue to be able to get them (in the mailbox or at the store).

Also, I wonder if the relative number of anthologies has affected magazine circulations before, or affected the quality of stories the magazines were able to acquire. When was the last big anthology boom? Seems like it might have been the 70s, but I'm no historian of SF.

In any case, subscribe!

Since You Asked...

Here's what I'm going to be teaching in my contemporary American fiction class this spring. I ended up going only with books published in the last 20 years (cheating by a year to add Beloved). If I had to do this list over again tomorrow, it would be different: more small-press stuff, more genre stuff, etc. But this time around, it's going to be:

Alexie, Indian Killer
Chabon, Kavalier and Clay
Diaz, Oscar Wao
Dunn, Geek Love
Eugenides, Middlesex
McCarthy, The Road
Morrison, Beloved
O'Brien, The Things They Carried
Ozick, Heir to the Glimmering World
Robinson, Gilead
Stephenson, Snow Crash
Whitehead, The Intuitionist

plus the Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories.

Comments welcome.

Happy New Year!

...he said on the 3rd, which is maybe a signal of what kind of year this is going to be.

Christmas was outstanding, as were the two Hanukkah feasts we attended/hosted. The kids now have telescopes, easels, Bakugan, cameras...

Also we made a bunch of fudge and cookies to send to these two soldiers we adopted through MySoldier.com -- threw in books and sock puppets, too.

In writing news, a longish story called "Seventh Fall" will appear in Subterranean one of these days. The timing is interesting in light of this particular story.

And, if you haven't seen this NYT piece about Jack Spicer, you should.