Cliche busting

So I finally, today, finished my last paper of this semester (!!!), which, by my peculiar procrastinatory habits, also means that I’m onto season two of my ONCE AND AGAIN dvds.

I just finished the episode “I Can’t Stand Up (For Falling Down),” written by Daniel & Sue Paige, who are not my favorite of the O&A writers, and some parts of this episode reminded me of why — like, because the episode’s framed around Eli’s struggles with the SAT, the episode starts with Eli, in one of the show’s trademark “artistic” black & white internal monologues, reciting SAT questions. For like five minutes. I am not joking.

But there was one scene that I admired for how it set up really obvious cliches, and then deflated them, all without making a huge deal of it. The setup is that Karen’s dorky boyfriend Leo has gotten her son Eli’s band a “possible gig.” (Said band, by the way, features a young and odd Adam Brody of THE O.C. fame.) The high school band is already such a cliche in and of itself*, and adding the first gig — it’s like, we may as well be watching the high school girl excitedly informing her parents of her first date and her dad settling in to interrogate the dude, is how high up we are on the list of things that happen on every tv show ever but in real life? Not so much by my count, but anyway — but the awesome thing is, the Adam Brody character in particular totally just mocks the shit out of Leo. There is no squealing over the gig, not even any Deep Pronouncements About the Art, just a mild sendup of how trite this all is. Nice.

Then, of course, we’re by extension into the territory of this scene’s other big cliche — Leo’s the guy who can’t quite accept he’s an adult and wants to be the one the high school kids think is cool — except when the Adam Brody character calls him on this by snarkily telling him he can’t actually be in the band, Leo basically tells him to go fuck himself. It’s very well delivered. And all this happens in the span of about two minutes, setting up and knocking down two easy chestnuts, so I’m all, “IIIIIIII’ve seen this befo– oh, nice! Oh, I know what they’re d– oh, heh!”

Well played, Paiges. Well played. Now, though, about those SAT questions. Please don’t do that again.

* By the way, the time I’ve seen the high school band/”soulful” musician device put to best use despite the cliches — and yes, it pains me to not have this be MY SO-CALLED LIFE’s “On the Wagon” episode, which is a total classic — is in pretty much every episode of FREAKS AND GEEKS. Jason Segal’s alacritous** embracing of every humiliation imaginable is put to the best possible use. So painful. So awesome.

** In reaction to the episode, I am now making up my own SAT words.

Every once in a while, something actually cool happens in high school.

Openly gay kid voted prom queen.

Wednesday Words: True, except when, actually, you don’t know where the hell you are

Being lost is never a matter of not knowing where you are; it’s a matter of not knowing where you aren’t.

- Norton Juster, THE PHANTOM TOLLBOOTH

My Big Fart, And Other Natural Disasters

… is totally the way I will remember Sydney Salter’s book, which in actuality is named MY BIG NOSE AND OTHER NATURAL DISASTERS. (Blog readers may recall this as the book I called out for its curly hair blunders, in what is now our most-read and most-linked post here at Underage Reading; Salter gets cool points for having a good sense of humor about the whole thing.)

I actually really didn’t like MY BIG NOSE much at first. It’s going for this breezy, contemporary tone, but I found a lot of the writing sufficiently generic at the line level that it just felt forced. The characterization, especially early on, also comes in really broad strokes in a way I found off-putting. Like, check this out:

“It’s going to be the best summer ever.” [... Hannah] fanned herself with her certificates for Outstanding Community Service, Super School Spirit, and Best Poetry. “We can relax and really discover our passions.”

“Like getting into college? Getting real work experience?” [offers the character Megan]

Who talks like that? The answer is no one.

Partly, I think the book suffered from uncertainty about how far into parody it wanted to descend. There were some priceless details; here’s one — the protagonist’s social-climbing mom is talking about a book club the higher-status moms hold — next to which I wrote, “This is almost a satire, and if it were it would be awesome”:

Mom leaned back, clutching a pillow to her chest. “I’ve been trying to swing an invitation to that book club for over a year. I read all the books just in case I get invited and people talk about previous selections.”

…But it wasn’t a satire; it gave us awesome shit like that but then also wanted us to take these characters seriously. I struggled with that.

However. MY BIG NOSE grew on me quite a bit as it went along. In part this is because it handled well some things — sexual violence, homosexuality* — that usually make an appearance in teen books only when they are The Point. Here, as in many teenagers’ actual lives, they are important parts of the pastiche of what our main character and her friends experience — and Salter takes them as seriously as they deserve — without being the dominant features of our hero’s life. This felt to me both convincing and refreshing.

The best part of this book, though, for me, was a so fully awesome scene that inspired the title of this post. It is a very extended, deeply hilarious depiction of what happens when our hero goes to yoga class while forced onto her mother’s cabbage soup diet. The gaseous results are reported to us in detail. In a book for girls! So rare!

It’s kind of like how masturbation is a staple of realistic-genre books for teen boys, but if I ask you about female characters masturbating, what will you say? That’s right, DEENIE. Which was published in 1973. Cheers to Salter for, thirty five years later, taking another little step forward in popular culture portraying girls as possessing bodily functions.

* By the way, one way that blogging has changed my book reading is that I am more accountable to my predictions about where a book is going (even when they’re pathetically off base). It was on page 101 of this book that I noted, “I think I had called [character] = gay before this, but now I am WRITING IT DOWN.” Sixty six pages later we get the scoop for real. I mention this because, now that I am in the habit of writing down my predictions, I’m wondering how many books I feel like “Oh, I saw that coming!” about, but only because I predicted like twenty different mutually exclusive plot developments, one of which actually occurred. Now we will be able to track this. Stay tuned.

Because a TV show is kind of like a novel, only without all that description, and with a lot more ironic segues.

So I’m working on my last paper of the semester, which means after a hiatus I’m back to watching ONCE AND AGAIN. …As in, I settled in yesterday after a long day of reading journal articles and practicing calculus* to watch one episode… and six episodes later, sun rising, birds chirping, said, Fuuuuuuuuuuck.

This compressed quarter-season of viewing began with the particularly MY SO-CALLED LIFE-echoing “Outside Hearts,” written by one Alexa Junge. My first thought? To wonder if Alexa Young, author of FRENEMIES (which I haven’t read), could possibly be a pen name for Alexa Junge. Because I could totally believe that someone who wrote this episode wound up as a young adult novelist.

Today’s Googling and IMDBing seems to make this unlikely (though not impossible), but now I’m wondering: anyone know of TV writers who also write YA? I’ve already read, and enjoyed, RATS SAW GOD by Rob Thomas (the creator of VERONICA MARS, whose first season I deeply, desperately love**, and the new 90210, which I’ve yet to see). It seems like these should be overlapping skill sets. Is the money so good in TV that once people are in it, there’s no point to writing novels? (Thomas, I believe, wrote novels before breaking into TV.) Anyone got recommendations?

* Yes, the weirdest way in which my summer plans altered this week is that I signed up for two math classes. This impulsive decision resulted from a professor, after reading another paper I wrote, pointing out that “I’m really pretty certain that this is true!” is less than convincing as a rationale for complicated claims about what happens when many things change at the same time. (He politely declined to note that my authority is particularly unpersuasive on such matters.) We’re going to see if this is as big a disaster as it clearly has the potential to be.

** Bonus: my viewing marathon ended with “Sneaky Feelings,” where a very young Jason Dohring (a.k.a. VERONICA MARS’s Logan Echolls) makes an appearance. Logan is the quintessential example of a character I know I shouldn’t love — because he’s a terrible person — but I do, I do. How do they do that?

A Ginormous list of picture books

Hopefully you all have been following along as A Fuse #8 Production counted down the Top 100 Picture Books of All Time. But in case you haven’t, or in case you, like me, love having everything in a nicely compiled list, here it is.

I posted my votes and runners up before the countdown began. All but 2 made it onto the list – the 2 being IRA SLEEPS OVER and SOMETIMES I LIKE TO CURL UP IN A BALL.  So I’d say overall, I win!*

More importantly, this is now an awesome list of books I love, and books I somehow never read but clearly will now go check out.  Elizabeth Bird also wrote up great descriptions and histories of all of the titles as the countdown went along, which I’d highly recommend reading. In conclusion, awesome by Elizabeth Bird, oh, and picture books rock!

*yes, I’m aware this wasn’t a contest per se. But it still seems to warrant an “I win!” which I am partial to declaring in contest and non-contest situations alike.

Fiction cognition

The comments on Monday’s complaint about the hero in WATERSMEET facing insufficient consequences for her mistakes have gotten me thinking about the cognition of reading fiction.

Early in our blog, Emily posted about a study finding that fiction readers’ vicarious experiences of characters’ emotions can be observed in the brain. Emily was puzzled about why this is surprising, and so am I: we know that the subjective experience of reading fiction involves identifying with characters; we know that subjective experiences are reflected in the brain somehow; isn’t this finding inevitable? Or at least, wouldn’t it be far more surprising were this not the case?

Today I’m having a different thought on fiction cognition, inspired by also agreeing with what what Emily commented on the WATERSMEET post: I don’t begrudge other people their good fortune in life (well, except those people I already… grudge), but I hold fictional heroes to a higher standard of needing to earn my respect and their good tidings.

And I think this is common; TV writer Alex Epstein, whose blog and books I think are very smart, often stresses that luck and coincidences in storytelling need to work against the hero, not for them. Otherwise it feels like the hero (not to mention the author) is getting the easy way out.

I’ve always thought this was one of those ways in which the rules of fiction simply diverge from relating what would actually happen in life; I’ve remarked on THE ABSOLUTELY TRUE DIARY OF A PART-TIME INDIAN crossing a bit too hard into the “life really works this way sometimes” side of “semi-autobiographical” at the expense of it’s story. The logic of fiction ain’t necessarily the logic of the world.

One reason, I think, is a simple violation of expectations: good stories set up a challenge, two things that both seem necessary and yet incompatible, and then surprise you with how they resolve the contradiction. You read a story trusting the author that you’re going to get such a twisty, hard-fought resolution; letting the protagonist off easy violates this expectation by resolving (part of) the conflict without any such surprise.

If you'd tried as hard as me... actually, you still would have lost, mofos.
(Picture from http://www.flickr.com/photos/wv/)

Now, though, I’m wondering if something else is going on in Epstein’s advice that coincidences and good fortune can happen, but only in the villain’s favor. My first year of college I read a fun book about cognitive biases by Thomas Gilovich, HOW WE KNOW WHAT ISN’T SO. One point of Gilovich’s that stuck with me: he argues that our tendency to judge other people’s failures as reflecting their lack of effort and skill, while chalking up our own disappointments to bad luck, isn’t just egotism. It comes out of something real about our experiences: we have access to our own effort, and so any disappointment seems to occur in spite of this and therefore must be bad luck. Whereas with other people, we don’t necessarily see the efforts they put in, and their failure in and of itself is evidence that this effort must have been insufficient. (Maybe we’d even say that our arrogance is caused by, as much as it causes, asymmetries of information like this?)

Which brings me back to storytelling. I’m thinking maybe one reason we can accept bad luck for protagonists but good luck for villains only is that this is how we experience the world as being for ourselves. So, it’s not quite right that fiction just needs to be set up differently than real life; it’s that fiction needs to be like we experience life, not like it actually is. Emily’s post was about getting into characters’ heads; maybe the characters also need to seem like they’re in yours.

What do you guys think?

Free Books!

Lenore is running two contests with Penguin where you can win a whole bunch of books at once:

• “Reality books”. I didn’t know what this meant (was picturing some book version of Big Brother — a show I’ve never seen but whose recaps I followed religiously on Television Without Pity for a time), although given how my prior humiliation at the hands of the phrase “realistic narrative” is burnt into my brain, I should’ve.

  Awesomest title: I AM A GENIUS OF UNSPEAKABLE EVIL AND I WANT TO BE YOUR CLASS PRESIDENT. I (successfully) ran for student council recently, which is a long and strange story that we won’t get into, and I am now so disappointed that this was not my campaign slogan.

• Fantasy books. All of these books from both contests are things I would totally read. Although maybe I should be ashamed to admit publicly that I would totally go for BETRAYAL OF NATALIE HARGROVE on the basis of its description, “Cruel Intentions meets MacBeth.” Whatever, dudes, it’s summer! Reading in the park!!!

Wednesday Words: So that’s what they mean by growing up

Mavis peered at me. “But did you change, JuhNEECE? Or are you still the same girl that was taking drugs and messing around with boys?”

“Well, yeah, I changed.” Before, I did all that stuff mostly out of boredom; now I did it at least partly out of spite.

– Janice Erlbaum, GIRLBOMB: A HALFWAY HOMELESS MEMOIR

History, Historical Fiction, and I’m a Dork

Since starting this blog, I’ve altered my reading habits somewhat. I’ve always been a one-book-at-a-time kind of girl — I just can’t do the being in the middle of lots of books at once — but I’m now usually switching back and forth between whatever adult book I’m reading (mostly on the subway) and kids books (mostly at home evenings and weekends).  And since for adult books I mostly read history, I’ve been thinking a lot about why I read so little history as a kid.

My thoughts go something like this:

I love reading history, particularly histories with a radical or left-wing bent. And its because a well-written history about something I care about that happened is, first and foremost, an exciting and engaging story. Even if I know the outcome more or less, there are truly inspiring characters, people I can relate to, situations that may be set in a different  time and place but that resonate with my own experiences.  There are exciting plot lines with frustrating moments, upsetting moments, triumphant moments.* In short, a lot of the same elements that make for a good fiction story.

Now, what’s odd to me is that I read very little history as a kid or teenager. I did read a lot of those blue biographies of famous people’s childhoods.** And I liked the “If you were alive in the time of…” books, which apparently are still around with updated covers, and I should check them out. But mostly I read tons and tons of historical fiction. The interest in history was there – I always loved social studies and history in school, I was always interested in and inspired by what I knew of the history of the labor movement,*** women’s movement, and abolitionist & civil rights movements. Part of what I liked so much about historical fiction was learning the history. I think if they had crossed my path, I would have been interested in good non-fiction histories of those movements and periods of time. I also had a very deep interest in the holocaust, read tons of historical fiction on it, but very little straight history that I can recall until I was maybe 15.

So I guess what I’m wondering is, why didn’t I read more history as a kid? Were there just not a lot of good, engaging history books out there? Did I just not come across them? Or I guess because my only experiences of reading history at that point were from school textbooks, I might have thought of history books as boring, even as I felt the subject matter was interesting and enjoyed learning about it.

I’ve read a lot of good things about WE ARE THE SHIP, which I haven’t gotten a chance to read yet. Are there other good non-fiction books that folks have come across lately, or remember from childhood?

*I get such strange looks on the subway sometimes because I’m reading what must look like a big boring history book and I’m grinning and almost jumping out of my seat in excitement because something so awesome just happened. Like, I just read a great history of Solidarity in Soviet Poland, and when all the workers were heading to their factories with food and sleeping bags to lock them selves in I just couldn’t contain my enthusiasm. (Yes, I am a huge dork.)

**I was talking about these with my dad the other day and he noted that this series idealized historical figures to the point of becoming fiction. Somehow I didn’t note that at the time, which is surprising since the history I got in elementary school was relatively non-idealized. (For example, in fourth grade my class put Columbus on trial for crimes against the Native Americans. I got to be the judge, which was super exciting, and when the jury found Columbus guilty I got to name the sentance and I gave him an infinity of homework.) 

***Which I first learned about from old folk songs. Picture a 4 year old skipping around the house, singing along to The Weavers’ Talking Union, and pausing to ask, “Daddy, what’s a scab?”