Big Book Purge

[dr_pretentious]

I've finally reclaimed my study from the spectral presence of my undead scholarly career. All those volumes of deconstructionist junk I used to throw across the room, and then had to finish reading anyway? I'm hauling them away tomorrow, and if Micawber Books in Princeton won't buy them used, I'll dump them as foundlings in the Murray Hall mailroom. All yours again, O foolish English Department! Farewell, Kristeva. Bite me, Foucault. Kiss my ass, Judith Butler. My bookshelves are still overflowing a little, but it's now possible to walk in my study without tripping on piles of favorites I actually intend ever to read again. Books that actually matter to me are no longer exiled to the floor by virtue of the literary theory tomes having made it onto the shelves first.

And then there's the box of books I liked so much I accidentally bought duplicates over the years. Audre Lorde's good, but I don't need two copies each of Sister Outsider and Zami. And what does anybody need with four different translations of The Epic of Gilgamesh? I halfway know how I ended up with seven different editions of the Aeneid--my mother dumped a whole bunch of her old Latin books into my boxes when I finally cleared my college stuff out of my old childhood bedroom, but why did my mother need four different Aeneids? In the end, even Virgil thought one was too many. Maybe she was hoping for one in which the kickass Carthanginian chick didn't die? As to my conclusion that I needed to keep the four different translations of Ovid's Metamorphoses that I'd somehow accumulated on my own, well, you can never have too much Ovid.

I didn't mean to reorganize the shelves, but it just started happening. At first, I was just trying to put all the novel research together, and all the tutoring stuff together, and all the old dissertation favorites I couldn't quite part with in an out-of-the-way section. Next thing I knew, I had a section for Grad School Books I Can't Bring Myself To Get Rid Of Yet That I Nonetheless Never Want To See Again. Since I'm under five feet tall, all I had to do was carry the stepladder up from the kitchen and put those on the top shelves. No danger I'll pick those up by accident.

The contemporary poetry got into everything, and there was no hope of pulling it all to put it in one place.

Weirdest discovery of the night: my offhand speculation about translating whatever lyric poetry comes out of the Oxyrhynchus papyri turned into a serious plan while I wasn't looking. All the classical lit stuff wanted to be on its own shelves, organized more for translation than research. I didn't even know I had enough books on Sappho to fill a foot of shelf space. My classical background's not really all that strong, but H.D. had a lot less of it than I do now when she launched the Poets' Translations Series in 1915. I remembered enough Greek to catch Anne Carson fudging the line breaks when If Not, Winter came out, and Anne Carson rocks, so maybe I'll produce some Stuff That Doesn't Suck.

In other news, I finally figured out why writing the program descriptions for next year's Writer's Weekend panels is taking so long, and my revelation was one of those Big Moments of Duh. I went into the task thinking, "They're just course descriptions, only for really short courses. I can write a course description in my sleep." Well, not for a course I don't know enough about to teach, I can't. So here I am trying to write a two-line description of a presentation for mystery writers on how to write about crime scenes. I haven't read a mystery novel in 15 years, and so far can claim the good fortune of never having seen a crime scene firsthand. What do I know about adapting novels for film? Less, as it turns out, than the nothing I know about how to write sex scenes, or, for that matter, how to write two-line descriptions of panels on how to write sex scenes. When faced with the fact of my ignorance about the life I want, what do I do? Clean out my bookshelves so I can feel all clever about the life that never suited me. I kept hoping I'd turn up the program from WW2004, since there weren't any panel descriptions to crib from in the 2005 program. Anyhow, the draft's done, and maybe it's just my perfectionism talking. Tomorrow I'll print it all out to read it over one last time for glaring stupidity, and then I'll have no choice but to expose my ignorance. Hey! Look! Over here! Stuff I Don't Know!

Comments

[sabrinamari.livejournal.com]

Wait! Wait! Can you set aside those books that have to do with the ancient world for me to look at? Ovide, Gligamesh?

I can maybe give some of them a good home.

Look, just keep in mind that no matter what you do, you cannot write more tedious sex scenes than LKH. You are a glorious writer, and your work actively creates addicts as your friends read it. So be at peace, oh soon-to-be-nationally-appreciated one. And I shall be so pleased to be a footnote in your biography when that time comes....

[vgnwtch.livejournal.com]

I'll take the Audre Lourde copies, and I don't have a copy of Metamorphoses.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

The Audre Lorde's yours.

You and Brina may have to duke it out over the Horace Gregory translation of Ovid. I thought I had two copies of Mandelstam's (my favorite), but now that everything's reorganized, I can't find the little one. The marked-up one I use for teaching stays here, and my Mom's old Latin hardbound, too. If I find the other Mandelstam, there'll be plenty of shapeshifting and sexual violence for everyone.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Oops. That's Mandelbaum, not Mandelstam.

[jeneralist.livejournal.com]

OK, so which currently published authors write good sex scenes?

[vgnwtch.livejournal.com]

Er... Not many?

[reynaud.livejournal.com]

I suppose it would depend: what do you mean by a "good" sex scene?

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Too many writers mistake a scene in which coitus occurs for a scene of eroticism, or intimacy, or love, or animal drive. Those are four things I can write pretty well. What I have difficulty writing is blow-by-blow accounts of the physical choreography. The main reason it's difficult is that I've found so few models that have been interesting to read, and I've given up looking. Other people's recommendations have not been useful. The hotter the erotica tries to be, the more it bores me, because nothing but choreography is really driving the story.

What I require from a sex scene is that it develop character and advance plot, just like any other kind of scene. If I feel like the storytelling has come to a screeching halt because somebody said, "Put a sex scene here, sex sells," I'm bored and annoyed well before the story resumes, and usually I put the book down and don't pick it back up. The most sex-saturated book I've finished reading in the past several years was Kushiel's Dart by Jacqueline Carey, which I read because I was likely to meet her at Writer's Weekend in 2004. The BDSM's a little thickly smeared on for my taste, but every time I tried to skim over the sex until the story resumed, I discovered that the sex I was skimming was actually bringing new elements of plot and character into the narrative. I mean, every single time. Even the stuff that left me cold, I had to admit was well crafted for readers who weren't me. Carey was able to persuade me that the protagonist truly did derive pleasure from her odd, tricky sexual power dynamics, but since I've never experienced endorphins--hazards of fibromyalgia--I can't really imagine what it would be like to experience physical pain as sexy. I had to say to myself, "This isn't a sexuality; it's a superpower." And then I could suspend disbelief enough to appreciate the other things the book was doing. One thing I'll give Carey: she never bored me.

When I find a fiction writer who can write about sex half as well as the poet Sharon Olds does, I'll sound the claxon.

The feminist essayist Carol Queen's collection Real Live Nude Girl is brilliant. Plus, she consistently comes up with titles for her essays that are original, memorable, and illuminating. A good title's hard to find. My series owes a lot of Rildis the Red's long-term career trajectory to Real Live Nude Girl.

[reynaud.livejournal.com]

I assume that you've tried reading the popular "classic" erotic writers, like Anais Nin.

Actually, I tend not to read books with sex scenes. Maybe it's just the kind of books that I read, but mostly I read something that sums up to, "and then they had sex." Either that or you know they are having sex, but it is not really described. Perhaps the best sex scene I have read recently came in "The Machiavelli Interface" by Steve Perry, where the scene does seem to further the plot and, to me, was pretty well written.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

I have this dim, vague recollection of trying to get into Nin when I was a teenager and reading her would have been all transgressive. It didn't click for me then--don't remember why--and I haven't picked her up since.

The main reason I've hoped to find sex scenes that didn't bore me to read is that I don't like being unable to write about a thing. This time last year, I couldn't write a battle scene to save my life. I spent a couple of months just going to school on good models, even a few I expected would leave me cold. After those months, I had a new addition to my list of favorite authors (Patrick O'Brian), and a new ability as a fiction writer. If I can learn to write scenes of naval warfare, surely it can't be more difficult to learn to write sex scenes. It's the technical challenge that motivates me, more than anything else. I wasn't any less motivated to learn how to write sestinas, and goodness knows, readers don't require sestinas.

In general, I think a scene that can be summed up with "and then they had sex" probably ought to be. The way I've been handling it so far in the manuscript is to concentrate on the mental and social dynamics that lead to the act, and the consequences of the act. The reader's quite capable of filling in the act itself, as the vast body of fanfic on the internet proves. Fanfic doesn't indicate that the canonical story has too little sex; it indicates the pleasure readers get from the freedom to titillate their own minds without the author's intrusion.

[reynaud.livejournal.com]

This time last year, I couldn't write a battle scene to save my life. I spent a couple of months just going to school on good models, even a few I expected would leave me cold. After those months, I had a new addition to my list of favorite authors (Patrick O'Brian), and a new ability as a fiction writer. If I can learn to write scenes of naval warfare, surely it can't be more difficult to learn to write sex scenes.

I suspect that you hit on one possible reason why it's hard to find well writen sex scenes. Think about battle scenes (ar, really, almost any scene): what you as a reader want is to live the event, and so as an author, you want to evoke the same feelings. So I can feel comfortable reading about a rousing account of two ships pounding each other with cannonballs while sitting on a park bench or at the beach. But how many people would feel comfortable, in a public place, getting into a scene, "living" it, as you will, of two people making love? Hell, how many people would feel comfortable in their own homes? And if the reader is going to feel uncomfortable, how is the author going to feel? And if they are not feeling comfortable, how can they write it well?

I've heard it say that the act of writing, or any artistry, is one of the most intimate acts there is. So when you combine that with one of the other of the most intimate acts, is it any surprise that it isn't easy to do?

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

The Kovacs Gilgamesh and the Gregory Metamorphoses are set aside for you.

[oaktavia.livejournal.com]

LKH's sex scenes tedious??

ok girl fess-up... what have you been readin' thats more addictive than LKH? titles please!! (junkie starving for good reads!!!!)

[vgnwtch.livejournal.com]

Brilliant on the purge/tidy front :D It feels so good when you've done it, doesn't it? Which reminds me that we've a purge coming up - I can feel it building.

Stuff you don't know? I have never known you sound anything but intelligent and knowledgeable, even when carefully explaining that you don't know what you're doing. Somehow, you have a way of couching everything in such a way that others go away thoroughly impressed. It's just That Thing You Do.

Books

[ingridsummers.livejournal.com]

If you have space for some of those Foucault books. While I find him tedious to read, he is quoted so often in so many of the courses I've been taking that I figure it would be good to actually read something of his from start to finish (rather than the chapters I've been getting). If you just really want them GONE, I understand as well.

Congrats on the purge. I hope to go through PG's bedroom while she in the outer banks next week. I can't cart it away, thought, until she returns - just on the slim chance that I've removed something she can't live without.

Re: Books

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

The Foucault I have is pretty limited to literary theory stuff. My guess is that the stuff you'd need would be "Panopticon," Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality, none of which I have.

[jeneralist.livejournal.com]

I'm in mid-purge as well, although somehow the urge to purge was directed towards the garage of all places. I've sold a motorcycle I'd never ride again, gotten rid of a spare gas tank, pulling the pieces of motorcycle saddlebags together so that they can go on Ebay -- and then I get the joy of getting Phil's motorcycles fixed to the point of being saleable. Then we will be able to walk thru the garage to where our bicycles are moldering, get them fixed up, and back on the road! All part of my master plan!


Um, how many copies of Gilgamesh did you have?


And if anyone's interested in out-of-date medical textbooks....

[vgnwtch.livejournal.com]

What are they on?

[jeneralist.livejournal.com]

Pediatrics, OB/Gyn, some "cram"-type review books for the big tests; most of the surgery books have already been dumped; a few out-of-date reference books...

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Four, of which I'd decided to keep three, one of each translation. But Sabrina's actually wanting one of the copies changes everything, and it's a big relief to be one book lighter.

[reynaud.livejournal.com]

As to the panel writing things, I suppose you didn't already have people to be on the panel, people you could farm the work out to, huh?

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

The conference organizer and the volunteers (which is to say, those of us who didn't run away fast enough) figured out what sorts of panels were necessary for the kind of conference she's running, and then I took on the task of organizing that into a schedule grid and writing encapsulations of what we'd come up with at the meeting to describe the panels we thought were called for. The Conference Maven in Chief is, so far, making most of the contacts with the agents, editors, and authors who make sense to match up with the topics, and then I get to handle the schedule fine-tuning and regular re-confirmation about whether they're still coming, etc. Which is how I ended up with an email address for George R.R. Martin's agent. Weird. Anyhow, I'm already the one it's been farmed out to, and it would be silly for me to delegate at this point, when I don't even know if I've screwed up yet. We have until next June to polish everything up.

[reynaud.livejournal.com]

Next June? Pshah! Why are you worried? You have plenty of time to procrastinate!!