I have 60 words in which to review a lengthy YA book which includes, in passing, hateful language which is totally in character for the protagonist (e.g. "fags," "spazzes in helmets"). The language is condemned neither by the text nor by any of the other characters; in fact, no attention is called to it at all within the text.

What I'm finding most problematic about this is not how to write the review. That's easy: I have 60 words, which means I tack on "bigoted" to one of my mentions of "the protagonist", which is about all I can do. No, what I'm finding most problematic is that this wouldn't have been an issue for me if the protagonist had been equally briefly and casually fatphobic, because I so take that for granted that I would have cringed and moved on. What's surprising in this book is that I don't actually expect over language of this sort to make it to the editing process without some kind of textual self-awareness being added. (I certainly am not surprised to find homophobia or ableism in contemporary YA, but more of the systemic kind, and not this sort.)

I know some people could make the same post and turn it into a judgment on the publishing industry for self-censorship, but I'm not one of them. I do think that language helps shape thought, and I think a raised eyebrow from another character or from the narrative voice could have clued in even the less aware reader that yes, the protagonist said "fags," and maybe that language is worth a second thought. I find it much more problematic that fatphobia is much more often treated with the same casual disregard this text gave to homophobia and ableism.



(Yes, I acknowledge that children's and young adult literature comprise a corpus created by adults for a group of readers who don't have control over their own literature and that we use their literature as a teaching tool. Like Nodelman, I find this both problematic and necessary.)

I've mostly been blogging on children's literature issues lately, not archives and library issues. I think this is because in archives, I'm much more concerned with the pragmatic macro/micro day-to-day realities of the nigtmare that is digital preservation, rather than with any attempt to drive the field forward. It's one of the reasons I haven't said anything about the DuraSpace announcement, not wanting to harsh on anyone's squee, because while in the long-term I can see real benefits to having a joint foundation, not tied to a single software solution, in the short run I just wish the Fedora Commons team would think more about the daily pragmatic realities of running a production preservation and access tool using their software.

But I am going to break my library silence because I haven't seen the Elsevier scandal get much play outside of the science and library blogospheres, and it should. In a nutshell, one of the ongoing Vioxx lawsuits revealed that Elsevier produced a fake peer reviewed journal as a marketing tool for Merck. The Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine was apparently high enough quality to fool doctors who weren't looking for shenanigans. Jacqueline at Laika's MedLibLog points out that this practice seems either more or less outrageous when you realize it's hardly unique. Good thing Elsevier assures us that it was an isolated practice and those responsible for sacking those responsible have been sacked!

Keep in mind that Elsevier has spent a substantial amount of time and money lobbying at least the United States and United Kingdom governments explaining that open access research will be devastating because it will be impossible for anyone to tell what is high-quality research and what is solid, peer-reviewed, and published by a reputable gatekeeper.

I've heard so much about Terry Pratchett's Nation that I was really looking forward to reading it, and I was very excited when I found it left by considerate housemates in the place where the night before I had deposited my borrowed copy of Oppel's Starclimber. I didn't know anything about the premise going in, and I certainly didn't know that by its conclusion it was going to become explicitly, didactically anti-racist and anti-colonialist. But less than 50 pages into it, I was already intensely disturbed at the world building. Alternate history Western Europe looks familiar enough, populated as it is with France and Britain, Christianity and the Magna Carta, Boadicea and the Crimean War. Yet the islander culture of this book is an invented people, in an invented ocean, with an invented island, invented animals, with an invented vaguely South Pacific culture, and an invented religion.

Maybe my immersion in the particular Internet cultures of which I am a part have changed me and my reading more than I thought, because I was surprised when Web searching did not turn up a whole lot of readers saying OH SIR TERRY NO.

The novel's author's note explains that the culture of the Nation is entirely unlike anything that happens in our world, because it is in a parallel universe. But if that's so, why is parallel universe Europe so readily identifiable? Why is it that Europeans look the same no matter what universe you are in, but naked, brown-skinned, equatorial islanders are people whose cultures you can invent out of whole cloth?

It troubles me to be critiquing this book along those lines, because it was so overtly anti-colonialist and anti-racist in its message (in its own complex KSKH way, at least). And I am not saying it shouldn't be read. I enjoyed it, although not as much as I have enjoyed some other Pratchett, and I think it's a fine book to put in children's hands. But I find the invention of a (sort of) Pacific Islander culture and religion really troubling in a world which -- very unusually for Pratchett -- actually resembles our world.

One frustrating thing about getting galleys (and trust me, I know the world's smallest violin is playing a maudlin tune right now) is that I want to talk about the books I read and I can't without spoiling other people for them. At least when I am reviewing I do you get to talk about the books, if not in a conversation, at least to what I assume is an appreciative audience.

I just finished my second reread of Kristin Cashore's Fire, and I'm overwhelmed by how much I want to talk about it (which, diceytillerman, means you are on tap). Those of you who have ever had to listen to me talk about books or culture know how much I love things that are kinda subversive, kinda hegemonic. Fire is one of the most kinda subversive, kinda hegemonic books I've ever read. I think I need to coin a new catch phrase for it: wicked subversive, wicked hegemonic. Except that "KSKH" rolls trippingly off the tongue, and "WSWH" most certainly doesn't.

On some axes -- say, gender -- it's got the same kinda subversive, kinda hegemonic reading which is pretty common in young adult girls' fantasy. But on others -- disability, attractiveness, class, family bonds, even narrative expectations -- it's just a wild swing along the subversive/hegemonic spectrum. Wicked S, Wicked H. Which, given my literary tastes, I obviously think is fabulous.

There are plenty of axes of convention this book doesn't challenge: heteronormativity, for example, or race in fantasy. Though it might be a surprise to the authors whose books I sometimes review, that's fine with me.

(Oddly enough, the last book I found this kinda/kinda was A Little Princess, of all things, which was much more complicated about class then it was in my memory. Though the book is one of my frequently-reread comfort books, the careful listen I had to give it while listening to the Librivox audio book showed me things about it I had never noticed while reading.)

Reason 1: Her blog post for today, "Intertextuality". Way to not-at-all sneakily introduce young readers to the completely accessible awesomeness of the subject they usually wouldn't get until college or graduate school, if at all, Kristin!

Reason 2: This galley which I am currently holding in my grubby little hand, with a cover graced with what I am reliably informed actually is an accurate depiction of a short bow.

I have such mixed feelings about Flora's Dare having won the Andre Norton award. On the other hand, I have mad love for the only other one of the nominees I'd had a chance to read so far, namely, Graceling. On the other hand, I think that Graceling seems to be getting a lot of (very well-deserved) buzz, while Flora's Dare Seems to be much less well-known, at least among children's literature folks. So here's hoping that Cashore and Wilce both get all of the buzz they deserve, and both get widely pushed on young adult fantasy readers as the splendid books they are.

And yes, I KNOW I have to read everything else on the list! I am so ashamed of myself. But first I have to review these five books sitting on my desk, and before I can do that I need to finish one of them, and then I need to *cough* write the paper I will be presenting in two months.

This entry was originally posted at http://deborah.dreamwidth.org/34812.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

What are some of your favorite digital libraries, archives, and collections? I don't mean what has your favorite content, but what is your favorite user interface? Which is easiest, simplest, most clear, most fun, prettiest, cleanest, most accessible, or simply best tied into your everyday workflow? What do you like about it? What do you wish were different?

(You might notice that this entry is crossposted from its new location, deborah.dreamwidth.org. I'm going to be cross posting from the new location to gnomicutterance for the foreseeable future, and everybody with a livejournal account can still comment over there using OpenID; your livejournal account is your OpenID account. Anonymous commenting is also turned on, as always. Gnomicutterance.livejournal.com is still going to be a functional address which mirrors all those posts, but I find Dreamwidth's commitment to accessibility and usability makes it more attractive than Livejournal.)

This entry was originally posted at http://deborah.dreamwidth.org/34514.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Judith Krug, founder of the American Library Association's Banned Books Week, and head of its Office for Intellectual Freedom for the last 42 years, died on Saturday at the age of 69. A lot of the ALA's commitment to intellectual freedom comes from Judith Krug, from conversations she started and from assumptions she made about the field. By extension, if you believe that amicus briefs have any power at all, a lot of American caselaw decided in favor of civil liberties are because of her. Even if you believe that sometimes Banned Books Week and the OIF weren't always as focused as they needed to be (I, personally, wish they drew a better distinction between "Banned" and "Challenged"), they've been hugely important in the US dialogue around intellectual freedom.

And via diceytillerman, I learned that Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick died yesterday. I don't even know what to say about that news; I'm pretty much stunned. I think I have to mirror what Dicey said about it: "I have a different brain because of you, and I'm grateful".

I've been reading Mary Anne Mohanraj's (parts one and two) and K. Tempest Bradford's posts in John Scalzi's blog with interest and pleasure (pleasure from their powerful and eloquent posts, and because I am choosing not to spend Sanity Watchers points on the comments). The conclusion of Tempest's post, however, is what really caught my eye:



To which I had the supremely unhelpful response of "Yes, please!" Unhelpful because F&SF needs to get fixed. It can't afford to keep driving out all these wonderful people. It's wrong and it's strangling and it's stupid. It harms primarily readers and writers of color, of course, but also white readers and writers, in all of the important ways people have been talking about for months.

But I still can't help myself from thinking "Yes, please!" Because, Tempest, F&SF won't appreciate you, but YA sure as hell will.

(Note that I am absolutely not propagating the idea that any good adult writer can also be a good children's or young adult writer. Writing good young adult fiction is difficult, and it's a and it's a different skill set for a different genre. Moreover, most young adult fiction is full length novels; it's not a genre in which the short story is particularly in fashion. But that doesn't mean Tempest shouldn't try.)

It's not that we have no authors of color writing fantasy and science fiction for young adults and children -- I just reviewed Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's latest and Cindy Pon's debut, both due out imminently -- but nobody could argue that we don't want more.

So here's a thing I wonder: there's a lot of talk going on right now about finding more books by authors of color. In children's and young adult science fiction and fantasy (my primary field), authors of color and protagonists of color are few and far between. So I wonder when I make a lengthy post (as I did earlier this afternoon) that happens to discuss several science fiction books by authors of color if I should be pointing that out, just because it raises the chance that bring these books to the attention of someone who might be interested.

The fact that the authors in question are PoC is not (exactly) relevant to the topic of the post, which is about science fiction genre conventions in general. On the other hand, the topic of authors of color is interesting to people right now (and I wish were interesting all the time). I know many of people would be interested in knowing that some of the authors mentioned in the post are science fiction authors who are also people of color. But it seems weird to call that out when that's not what the post is about, you know? I didn't even tag the post "race" because it's not about race. I don't know what I should be doing in circumstances like this.

Fundamentally I think I can say the Attorney General was right about at least about me: I am part of a nation of cowards. It's odd how much many of us Good White Liberals™ were brought up to believe that mentioning someone's race is somewhere between tacky and racist.
"You see that guy over there? The tall one? No, slightly to the left of the other tall one?"
"You mean the Indian guy?"
"..."

(Now there is another post I've been thinking of making about some of those same books, and this other post is about race. In the tiny set of science fiction by black authors marketed to young adults, there do seem to be a lot of books with very mythic spiritual overtones. I'm thinking of Walter Moseley's 47, Virginia Hamilton's Justice and Her Brothers trilogy, and Nnedi Okorafor's books. It's a tiny sample set, so I don't know if I can reasonably extrapolate from that. They are also authors with very different backgrounds and personal histories. But I'm intrigued by it, because it's a touch of mysticism that I don't feel like I usually see in other science fiction, either for adults or younger readers, including science fiction by black authors. Does anyone know more about this than I do? I'd love to learn more.)

(Note: This post started as being one about trends I see in young adult and children's science fiction, but turned into something of a critique of Farah's article. I want to preface the post, then, by saying that I have nothing but respect for Farah, and I agree with the overall thrust of her article and her point. I'm niggling because I see more positivity for the genre and the direction it's going right now than she does, not because I disagree with her overall thrust. ETA: Farah offers important clarifications.)

( Wow, this got long. Dystopias in young adult science fiction, and optimism about the genre. )

For some time now, I have been unhappy about the thinning of the wall between authors and readers that has taken place in the blogosphere. I've never been able to pin down exactly why (except in little ways -- as a reviewer, I had to stop reading Scott Westerfeld's blog when he started posting gleefully about positive reviews he'd received from me). I've also found it frustrating when other people post mixed or negative reviews on their own blogs, which they immediately retract if the author shows up in the blog comments to ask why the review was negative. The sense the blogosphere gives us of all being friends makes it more difficult to fulfill the professional obligation of the reviewer: to advise people on where to spend their limited resources.

Now I have a non review-related example of how this thinning wall aggravates me. Will Shetterly's behavior online has made me feel uncomfortable about the fact that his Elsewhere is required reading in my class, because I don't want to give him the sales. This is clearly a ridiculous concern on my part. For one thing, I regularly support far more loathsome people with my purchases. Shetterly, on the other hand, was probably once a pretty well-meaning guy who has just reacted pretty badly to being told that his own history of hardship does not make him always right. But more important, much more important, the book is pedagogically important. It's a little-known precursor to the genre which would eventually spawn Wicked Lovely and Twilight. Giving Shetterly a few dollars in royalties (dollars he desperately needs; the man is filing for bankruptcy, not living large on ill-gotten gains, and unless I'm going to stop requiring Twilight I really just need to get over myself) is the necessary price to teach my students what I need them to know to understand the genre.

Still, it sticks in my craw. And it shouldn't, I should be able to keep the artist and the art separate in my head. It makes me sad that the blogosphere has made that more difficult for me.

ETA: A. helped me narrow down exactly what's making me uncomfortable here. It's not an artist being Wrong on the Internet; Orson Scott Card, for example, is Wrong on the Internet pretty much every time he opens his keyboard. It's this thinning of walls, this Internet-created feeling of fellowship which allows us to engage with each other in the same spaces. When Card is an ass, he's an ass in newspaper columns. When authors engage with their critics (not even critics of their books, but critics of their extratextual words) in the spaces populated by their fans and critics, I get uncomfortable. As A. pointed out, some of the people Shetterly is insulting, investigating, and posting rumors about could easily be my students or potential students. It's that which makes me uncomfortable, not his willful blindness to the legitimate concerns of people whose side he would like to think he is on.

Well, that, too.

I'm worried that this entire blog is going to turn into a repetition of "look what I posted in that other blog this week!" but I'm getting to post such cool stuff I can't help pointing to it and saying "see!"

Seriously, this week my blog post got to include a photograph of a glass cuttlefish. How cool is that? And it was torment choosing among all the photographs, and having to decide not to use the images of the glass borellia viridis, the glass annelida, or the glass coelenterata.

I mean, seriously, glass flowers, Harvard? There are no flowers that are this cool.

Okay, maybe they are a tiny bit cool.

Aw, I can't resist. Here, have a glass Portuguese Man-of-war: ( behind a cut to preserve your screen real estate )

I am honored to be a presenter at the forthcoming Diana Wynne Jones Conference, in Bristol this July. (Except now I have to write the paper.)

I am honored to've been asked to teach Fantasy and Science Fiction at the Center for the Study of Children's Literature again this Fall. (Except now I have to prep for the class again.)

If only my time-consuming avocational successes paid well enough to support me, so that making time for them could be easy.

Yesterday, in the Tufts Digital Collections and Archives blog (tufts_dca), I talked about our newly-launched institutional repository, Tufts eScholarship. I'm very optimistic about the success of our IR, though there has been a lot of conversation in the IR world about what makes institutional repositories fail. The number one reason I'm optimistic about our IR: it's not what purists would call an institutional repository.

( I'd like to buy university digitization efforts a Coke and teach everyone how to work with each other: cut for length )

The decisions leading to this wonderful conjunction of circumstances all predate my presence here at the university by many years. I'm talking about this not to toot Tufts' horn, but to push this vital idea of collaboration. Even now, I see so many institutions in the repository space that have entirely orthogonal approaches within their own organizations. The people digitizing images aren't talking to the people digitizing texts aren't talking to the people dealing with digital records aren't talking to the people doing institutional repository. Sure, maybe you would never use the same software platform or workflow approaches for all of these efforts. But maybe you will. Maybe instead of getting six different perfect software packages, you will find something that is good enough for all of you, and uses only one license, a smaller number of technical support staff, and something which will continue to be supported by your university even if hard economic times make some of the digital collections look less important.

Heck, I'm looking at this entirely selfishly, and you should too. In tough economic times, digital archives might go by the wayside. Open access institutional repositories are still untested. But management of the university's digital records is never going to be unnecessary. Work with other people instead of merely alongside them, intertwine your jobs, and you will not just save your institution money and resources, but you will increase the number of ways in which you are vital. Job security FTW.

I was lucky enough to see an early copy of Kristin Cashore's forthcoming Fire, which takes place in the same universe as her debut Graceling although substantially earlier. There are many things I could talk about when discussing what I love about this book. I could talk about how much I love the protagonist and the plot, which is true. I could talk about how squeeful it makes me for there to be incidentally disabled characters in this world. I could talk about how much I love Fire's unconventional character arc -- so unconventional, in fact, that even knowing Graceling as I did I fully expected a last-minute situational reprieve.

But instead of going to talk about what really fascinates me: how Fire is not a Mary Sue. Generally, that's not such a big deal. Most fictional characters aren't Mary Sues. But Fire ought to be. I just plugged her into one of the Mary Sue Litmus Tests and got a 96. If I hadn't read the book, but had somebody describe it to me, I would have yelled "Mary Sue! Mary Sue!" gleefully. Unusually colored hair? Check. Everyone loves her? Check.

And yet, ultimately, Fire is a fully realized and intensely flawed character, far more than the sum of her identifiably-Sueish traits. If I didn't know better, I'd see her as a reaction to litmus tests, almost as if the author said "these are bogus; I can write a character with all of these traits who is not a Sue at all". (Cue aside about authorial intent and how interesting it is to read her as a reaction to litmus tests even though I know she wasn't written that way.)

One of the things I love about Kristin Cashore's writing is how, while writing firmly within genre, she consistently breaks narrative expectations. Yet my love for Fire as a character who breaks out of Mary Sue tropes is a little bit silly, isn't it? After all, the clearly identified trope of Mary Sue doesn't come from conventional published original fantasy (although it certainly exists there as well). How can I read across genre-boundaries when I say that the text is breaking narrative expectations?

Here, of course, I'm the reader whose expectations have been so satisfyingly broken. I read both girls' fantasy and fan fiction, so I have narrative expectations that cross both genres. But the book itself certainly doesn't have an implied readership of fan fiction readers. Although that's not necessarily true. Given the marketing and demographic realities of current young readers of fantasy, there may well be an extremely large overlap between this book's implied readership and those who are familiar with the tropes of fan fiction, just as there is probably an extremely large overlap between this book's implied readership and those who are familiar with, say, High School Musical. Is that overlap relevant, though? Would Hunger Games be a different book if its implied audience weren't very likely to be familiar with Survivor-like reality shows?

I'm just thinking aloud here; I don't have answers to any of these questions.

Except to say that Fire was totally awesome.

My heart goes out to family and friends of ALSC Vice President Kate McClelland and Kathy Krasniewicz, who were killed in a hit-and-run accident on their way to the airport after leaving ALA. American children's literature is rocked by the news.

I've just been catching up on a month of old ChildLit messages, and current context is making me notice something unpleasant. When there's an accusation of cultural appropriation in LJ fandom, fans immediately fall on the side of saying "How dare those of you with white privilege tell PoC their claims of having been harmed are false?" Whereas on ChildLit, accusations of cultural appropriation lead to a massive pileup on -- well, pretty much always on Debbie Reese. I don't always agree with Debbie, but the constant claims over there that her understanding of Native appropriation is wrong leave a vile taste in my mouth. Especially when contributors hit multiple bingo squares:

• You're telling us what we can't write!
• You're telling us what we can't read!
• It's just fiction.
• No, it's different when it's a non-Native [in this case Jewish] story that's mistold; that's BAD.
• Isn't it racist to say you need Native clearance to tell this story?
• But the author had anti-racist intentions!
• You say that the characters are portrayed unrealistically as members of their culture, which means you want a sterotypical portrayal, which is racist.

steepholm, diceytillerman, fjm, other ChildLitters, am I wrong? I know I'm a month out of date with my reading, but it really seems sketchy, how that conversation usually goes. And it happens again and again. Is fandom really that much more capable of seeing its own white privilege than ChildLit (which I know is not monolithically white any more than fandom is)?

yAt! My copy of the encyclopedia Women in Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by Robin Anne Reid, has arrived. I wrote the essay "Girls and the Fantastic" and the short entries for Ursula LeGuin and Raphael Carter. I'm so pleased by it, and will shelve it right next to my Oxford encyclopedia of children's literature.

In other news, I'd like to encourage you to check out the Tufts Digital Collections and Archives blog (tufts_dca), especially if you like photo blogs. lamentables, I'm looking at you! We post about once a week, and most of the posts involve an awesome picture from our archives. For example, my most recent contribution there, "Disaster!", features a fabulous photo of Jumbo the Elephant looking just a tad battered.

Reading deepad's insightful thoughts on culture, literature, and Western/white monopolies in publishing raised, for me, many of the issues I've been pondering as a book reviewer.

( Reviewing: no book is perfect, but how problematic does it need to get before I say something? )