From an optimist, a bit of negativity. Followed by optimism.

Negativity—especially of the churlish variety—is not my scene. After a brilliant eureka moment in my early undergraduate life, I put away the majority of my haughty, ironic, suspicious-of-optimism, Judgy McJudgerson teenage legacy and moved on to a much happier existence. The idea of Bronies (which I just read about today) tickles my heart; the sheer joy and exuberance exploding from Jimmy Fallon at every turn on his late late show is my bread and butter.

Not for its cynicism did I spend six years studying Russian lit, nor do I inhabit the young adult and kidlit world in order to have a ready supply of lesser-than things to make fun of. Rather, I did both for the wit and humanism and fantastic use of language so often employed therein. Sincerity and optimism, that's my game.

So you can understand why I have mixed emotions taking time to write about a series of things I've come across thus far in 2012 that, well, I am feeling really negative and judgy about. Even though—or maybe especially because—the negativity comes from a place of optimism. But these things are so tied to what I hold near and dear to my heart that, well, I just want to say something. So I will say my something, and then I will move on. And we will make Mondays days of love and sincerity from here on out.

CASE THE FIRST
The first thing that rankled me I saw last week, and was the bizarrely visceral lit-snob reaction to the appointment of Walter Dean Myers as National Ambassador for Young People's Literature. I didn't take the editorial very seriously—I think it was intentionally incendiary (and willfully self-serving), and anyone even a bit clever can understand that the argument doesn't even correspond with the meaning of the actual appointment (an ambassador is not a laureate, or an instructor, or a mirror, for example).

However, I do dislike it when anyone claims that a) literature's only goal is to elevate, and b) that "to entertain, to problematize, or to instruct" cannot simultaneously elevate. I am not claiming that all —hell, I'm not even claiming that literature's only goal should be to elevate. But I do think that anytime a person chooses to read something for their own edification, they are doing themselves a service. All exercises in reading are transformative:

Psychologists from Washington University used brain scans to see what happens inside our heads when we read stories. They found that "readers mentally simulate each new situation encountered in a narrative". The brain weaves these situations together with experiences from its own life to create a new mental synthesis. Reading a book leaves us with new neural pathways. (Washington Univ. in St. Louis, via The Guardian)

…so even if Myers' work is "insipid" (which, whatever. Opinions are opinions.), the act of reading his work can do good just as well as Homer (or any number of increasingly ill-judged bawdy Old English bits) can. Either/or paradigms are harmful, especially if the result is keeping kids from actively engaging, on their own time, with literature, whatever that may be.

In any case, the guy is zany, which comes a dime a dozen, and Myers is still the one with the prestigious appointment, so, again, whatever. Also, I recognize that cultural snobbery is the Achilles Heel that brings out my cynicism. Okay. Water under the bridge.

However, today I came across two more things, in quick succession, that bit at me, and a series of three is always stronger, so. Here we are.

CASE THE SECOND
TEDtalks! Why are you doing me wrong?

For some reason, an economist got on stage to talk about his suspicion of stories. Yes, stories. That video is sixteen long minutes of your life, and I don't necessarily recommend anyone watch it, but there it is for those interested.

The takeaway is, humankind's tendency to frame everything—memories, lives, advertising—into stories is somehow…reductive? Constricting? Bad? Honestly, I'm a clever person, able to read literary criticism in Russian, but I could barely follow his argument. It was very…personal, I think. And yes, maybe I was feeling a bit ornery, my very avocation being called to task, but. Please.

Stories are used because framing the chaos and mess (which Cowen wants us to instead embrace, yet somehow not try to frame for better understanding) is how we make sense of life, how we can find meaning and move forward from the things that happen to us. I can understand the desire to be suspicious of stories people tell when selling something—obviously. Sales is a game, and you should always look outside the pitch's box. But just being human and telling stories? Being suspicious of that just promises exhaustion.

CASE THE THIRD
Being (and using) awesome.

This was highlighted in today's Shelf Talker, and it totally caught me off-guard. A bookselling dude in California has made it his mission to cull the word "awesome" from everyday English, citing its ubiquity and utter lack of real meaning as a source of physical pain.

"Saying the word in my presence is like waving a crucifix in a vampire's face," Tottenham says. "It's boiled down to one catchall superlative that's completely meaningless."

I am all for linguistic flexibility and creative oral latitude, but MAN OH MAN can you be a bigger Grinch? Hating people who use and believe in the word awesome is like hating puppies for tugging on each other's ears. Nerdfighteria's DFTBA mantra is the precise opposite of a cliché, and the precise example of people loving language and creativity and intelligence to BE BETTER. Or, as Tottenham would hate to hear it, more awesome.

This guy is a bookseller. I don't even. I hope he learns to spend more of his time enjoying things.

ANYWAY
There ends my wind of negativity. I just didn't like seeing 2012 get off to such a cynical start. Because 2012 is going to be a year of AWESOME. STORIES. And optimism.

You know how I know? Because today, right after being bombarded by cases the second and the third, I opened a birthday package from a dear college friend, and found THIS:

Yes, that IS Minnesota running at you with HUGS.

So. 2012. Be awesome. Tell stories. Hug people. Be optimistic.

GO.

RTW: Guess This Dystopian Pitch

(updated: the link is also at the end, but the answers can be found here)

Love a puzzle. Love slapstick. Love reversal-filled, ambiguous conversations. So getting you guys to guess some of my favorite books by my own abstruse elevator pitches? On. It.

This week's topic: You're re-reading one of your faves when someone asks the dreaded question: "What's that book about?" Give us your best off-the-cuff blurb of any book, any genre, and have your readers try to guess the title in the comments!

Okay, okay. So this isn't quite about puzzles and slapstick, but I saw "blurb" and thought "pitch," and from "pitch" went straight to Abbott and Costello:

Costello: Look, You gotta pitcher on this team?

Abbott: Sure.

Costello: The pitcher's name?

Abbott: Tomorrow.

Costello: You don't want to tell me today?

Abbott: I'm telling you now.

Costello: Then go ahead.

Abbott: Tomorrow!

Costello: What time?

Abbott: What time what?

Costello: What time tomorrow are you gonna tell me who's pitching?

Abbott: Now listen. Who is not pitching.

Costello: I'll break your arm, you say who's on first! I want to know what's the pitcher's name?

Abbott: What's on second.

Costello: I don't know.

Abbott & Costello Together: Third base!

This pretty much informs half the dialogue between my MC and The Boy. Those scenes just fly.

But that isn't this week's topic. So. On to the pitches! I am going to give you two, one from my current YA pile, and one from my Russian exam pile. You'll see why in a moment.

Pitch The First
Okay, so there's this Society – and this is some unknown time in the future – where human social interaction has been turned into a science and all activity is measured and prescribed based on scientific calculations, including what once would have been called romantic pairings. The Society's solution to love is a mandatory operation that leaves people patient and unexcitable. The main character narrates a several month period in this Society after a new romantic interest comes into the picture, one who has not been assigned by the Society and who introduces to the very scientific, rule-abiding protagonist an unfettered, freer way of living life – a way that includes passion, love and an anarchic underground group that is out to antagonize the Society. 

Pitch the Second
Okay, so there's this Society – and this is some unknown time in the future – where human social interaction has been turned into a science and all activity is measured and prescribed based on scientific calculations, including what once would have been called romantic pairings. The Society's solution to love is a mandatory operation that leaves people patient and unexcitable. The main character narrates the changes that occur after the idea of love is made less abhorrent by a new romantic interest, whose presence in the story forces the main character to question the very basis of the "science" that Society uses to keep love at bay. The romantic interest also has connections to an anarchic underground group that is out to antagonize the Society.


Yes, I made those pretty dang ambiguous.

Intentionally.

But to help you guys figured this out, here are two SPECIFIC details, one that matches to each, that make these books more distinct in an elevator pitch: one of them involves a planned spaceship project, a glass wall between the Society and the wild, and all the characters are named not with names, but with a combination of a letter and three numbers; the other one involves a rewriting of history and mythology to support the idea of love as the root disease of all human ills, cities bounded by guarded walls to keep the wild out, and characters named after prostitute "saints."

So. Guesses?

Answers – and videos! including a dance interpretation! – are in this backdated post.

Happy Wednesday, all!

RTW: Guess This Pitch REVEALED

Oh, dystopians. How we humans love you.

So! The first book Tomorrow* off-the-cuff pitched was...

WE, by Evgeny Zamyatin

The official blurb from the Mirra Ginsburg translation (trust her):

In the One State of the Great Benefactor, individuals have been replaced by numbers and passions subdued. But when the chief architect of the spaceship "Integral," known as D-503, has a chance meeting with the beautiful I-330, he stumbles upon an unexpected discovery that threatens all he believes about himself and the One State.

And, as promised, a modern dance interpretation (which is very cool):

And the second book was...

DELIRIUM, by Lauren Oliver.

And that official blurb:

Before scientists found the cure, people thought love was a good thing. They didn’t understand that once love -- the deliria -- blooms in your blood, there is no escaping its hold. Things are different now. Scientists are able to eradicate love, and the governments demands that all citizens receive the cure upon turning eighteen. Lena Holoway has always looked forward to the day when she’ll be cured. A life without love is a life without pain: safe, measured, predictable, and happy. 
But with ninety-five days left until her treatment, Lena does the unthinkable: She falls in love.

No modern dance interpretations that I could find for that one on quick review. But I am sure they will come with time.

So the takeaway from all this?

1) Russian literature is on its sh*t.

2) Dystopians are forever.

Now all you YA folk: go read WE!

I doubt my readers will believe me when I say…

I am going to – for the first time ever! – get on board (rimshot) with this whole YA Highway Roadtrip Wednesday business. Finding a community – that's what growing up is about, right?

Well. Today's prompt was broad, about questions relating to writing and publishing, and so I suppose what I have been thinking about most in these last few weeks is, what kind of role is there for unreliable narrators in YA fiction these days? 

I don't think it's any secret that I breathe and bleed Russian lit, when I am not writing my YA/MG stuff, and that is a canon replete with unreliable narrators.

Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire, one of my favorite examples of unreliable narrator.

The POVs are inconsistent and impossible (to quote one reviewer, they are "less who-dunits as they are who-wrote-its"), and all the more so when the narrator breaks the fourth wall and speaks to his readers: that's when you know that nothing is going to be predictable, that the story is not just fictional but unreal, that you can't jump into it and pretend it is real life, because it just CAN'T be. Russian lit is escapism for a society that has to prove they're not doing any escaping at all.

So what about today's (especially American) YA? I love an unreliable narrator, and I would love to write my Russian farce redux with one – I already have the intro laid out:

Noble’s – ah, Noble’s. I myself have spent no little time there, and can personally vouch for the excellence of the service, the quality of the appointment, and the delicacy of the food: in all respects, Noble’s is, indeed, a fine establishment. But you, my dear readers, will perhaps not believe me – you will perhaps not recognize my opinion as authority. And little you should.

But I just don't feel like this kind of unreliable narrator lands in today's market – not even from a publishing standpoint, but just from one of readers' interest: I feel like why YA works is that it offers worlds that ARE just about real enough to escape into. We don't want a narrator that proves to us we can't.

Or do we? I am sure there are examples out there of unreliable YAs that just aren't springing to mind.

Thoughts?

Speaking of marginalia…

There was a lovely look at the role of marginalia in paperbound books today in the NYT, which continues my discussion from yesterday on the role of the reader as participant and not just observer in a text:

"Studs Terkel, the oral historian, was known to admonish friends who would read his books but leave them free of markings. He told them that reading a book should not be a passive exercise, but rather a raucous conversation."

I am not at all a part of the Russian-order, monologic school of reading and learning.  I adore used books, and borrowed books; I love engaging with previous readers and the author (himself, too, technically a previous reader) when diving into a new book, and I leave my own dogears and underscoring and marginal exclamations in for the next reader – even if that next reader is me, a few years down the road.

There is so much to learn from how others engage with material, much of which is related to the sensory, tactile experience of holding a book and seeing grease smudges and fingernail scoring and little rips in the pages that can't be replicated in the digital form.  I have nothing but positive thoughts for ebooks and the possibilities digital publishing affords, but I can't imagine a world without marginalia, and without a conversation between readers over time.  In this way, I absolutely agree with one of the voices in the article:

"David Spadafora, president of the Newberry, said marginalia enriched a book, as readers infer other meanings, and lends it historical context. “The digital revolution is a good thing for the physical object,” he said. As more people see historical artifacts in electronic form, “the more they’re going to want to encounter the real object.”"

My own experience with marginalia is rich, and funny, and dear, but one incident stands out in recent memory: reading the Dostoevsky novella, Notes from the Underground, I came across a note I had taken down in undergrad, in response to the Underground Man's comment, "Haven't you noticed that the most refined bloodshedders are almost always the most civilized gentlemen to whom all these Attila the Huns and Stenka Razins are scarcely fit to hold a candle[…]?"

My advisor was Finnish and crazy, and apparently had this to add to the discussion:

The huns… not a pleasant people.

I about died laughing when I found it during this second reading.  Even Dostoevsky can be funny, with marginalia kept in tact.

So any other marginal anecdotes out there? Am I in the minority, loving to mark up books and to read others' vandalism?

ZING.

Reading the introduction to a mid-19th century collection of essays meant to characterize the city of Saint Petersburg (this is my life), I found this commentary on the superiority of show versus tell in the literary mode:

Furthermore, Mr. Bashchurtsky's book had as its primary goal to describe Petersburg, not to characterize the city.  Indeed, its tone was more official than literary.  By contrast, the content of our book seeks not to describe Petersburg but primarily to characterize its mores and the distinguishing features of its population.


And, as a very funny (and dry) sidenote,

To expound at length on this work [Moscow and Muscovites, by a Mr. Zagoskin] is inappropriate.  Let us only say that despite all its merits, ones that fully justify the fame enjoyed by its writer, the work has a glaring deficiency;  that is, it describes neither Moscow nor Muscovites.


Oh, snap.

Thank you, Russian literature, for always having my back.