If You Like That Sort Of Thing

Richard Brody on Susan Sontag:

Just as neither Garbo nor Dietrich could love the boy next door, so Sontag couldn’t embrace the popular art at hand—pop movies, pop music—without fatally dispelling her exotic aura. She loved, but couldn’t unite her intellect with her love. She couldn’t speak of her pleasures; in her journal, in late 1965, she wrote that her “biggest pleasure the last two years has come from pop music (The Beatles, Dionne Warwick, The Supremes) + the music of Al Carmines”; yet there’s no trace of this demotic passion in her essays. She couldn’t write about rock stars because she was, in effect, becoming one. She couldn’t personalize movie directors because she was becoming a movie star.

Imagine the truly radical impact Sontag might have had on her cultural circles, on her times, if she had considered and praised actual rock stars, or Jerry Lewis and John Wayne and Joan Crawford, or Samuel Fuller and Vincente Minnelli.

On writing for children:

Certainly we want to protect our children from new and painful experiences that are beyond their emotional comprehension and that intensify anxiety; and to a point we can prevent premature exposure to such experiences. That is obvious. But what is just as obvious — and what is too often overlooked — is the fact that from their earliest years children live on familiar terms with disrupting emotions, fear and anxiety are an intrinsic part of their everyday lives, they continually cope with frustrations as best they can. And it is through fantasy that children achieve catharsis. It is the best means they have for taming Wild Things.

-- Maurice Sendak (1928-2012)

Beyond Binary!

I'm late to announce this, but Beyond Binary was released early! You can now buy it at all the usual places--and with stories by Cat Valente, Kelly Eskridge, Nalo Hopkinson, Delia Sherman, and many other amazing writers, it's a worthy investment not only for your entertainment (these are science fiction stories, after all) but for the promotion of queer fiction and the community of writers working to break down barriers of gender and sexuality.

Buy a copy today!

Necessary reading:

Roxane Gay on The Hunger Games:

I learned a long time ago that life often introduces young people to situations they are in no way prepared for, even good girls, lucky girls who want for nothing. Sometimes, when you least expect it, you become the girl in the woods. You lose your name because another one is forced on you. You think you are alone until you find books about girls like you. Salvation is certainly among the reasons I read. Reading and writing have always pulled me out of the darkest experiences in my life. Stories have given me a place in which to lose myself. They have allowed me to remember. They have allowed me to forget. They have allowed me to imagine different endings and better possible worlds.

A good review!

Charlie Jane Anders, reviewing over at io9, enjoyed her reading of Beyond Binary, and singled out my story for mention:

"...a lot of the best stories in this book have an undercurrent of menace, of the fear of losing yourself — like "Ghost Party" by Richard Larson, in which the threat of becoming a ghost is sort of a metaphor for surrendering your selfhood and being taken over, claimed, owned."

Very happy, especially as I'm considering expanding the story into something bigger...

... in which I write about THE HUNGER GAMES:

Typically, the main element missing in film adaptations of novels—specifically those written in the first person, such as Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games—is the inevitable intimacy we develop with the story's narrator, which we take for granted in our experience of the text and only notice when experiencing the same story without such privileged access. When a character's most private thoughts are perpetually available to the reader, the resulting experience is at once more sensual and more narrow than its cinematic counterpart, our window to the world only as large as a single narrator's experiences, revelations, and prejudices. We know, for example, when Katniss Everdeen, the spunky female protagonist of The Hunger Games, is faking a reaction or hiding an emotion, not telling a particular story out loud even when its implications are at the forefront of her mind. And all of this is difficult to properly translate to the screen, despite Jennifer Lawrence's best efforts here in Gary Ross's adaptation. The experience of the film is more closely aligned to that of reality television, an entertainment predicated on our desire to know people intimately just by watching them live their lives in front of a camera, regardless of how much of the material is scripted, staged, or simply the result of a series of moments strung together in montage while in actuality having nothing to do with one another. If the experience of reading Collins's novel is one of being inside a horrifyingly brutal reality television show, the experience the film adaptation offers is one more akin to watching one, and its success depends on our awareness of this relatively new medium as well as our willingness to critique it.

Story sale! etc

My story "This Serious Moonlight" will appear in an upcoming issue of Scape Magazine, a new YA speculative fiction publication which has already published some great stuff. I'm excited about doing more YA stories like this one and "The Ghost Party," which is being reprinted in a month or so in Beyond Binary, an anthology of bisexual and genderqueer SF.

Also, I'm seeing The Hunger Games tonight, which I'll be writing about for The House Next Door. Extremely excited, to say the least.

Grad school...

... is over! Just finishing my thesis (on Nabokov's Pale Fire in case you were interested) but coursework is completely finished. Or at least for now, as I busy myself applying to my next grad school program. I think I'll probably be in school forever, which is fine with me.

A new year!

It's a new year (!!) and that means that Strange Horizons has done their annual year-in-review post, in which I have yet again contributed. Here's my bit:

I'm still getting through a lot of the year's short fiction for Nebula nomination season, but so far one of the 2011's knockout stories for me is "Younger Women" by Karen Joy Fowler: a pitch perfect take-down of the allure of the vampire in YA fiction. I also really loved Caitlin R. Kiernan's "Tidal Forces" in Eclipse Four, one of the best and most affecting love stories I've read in a long time. New collections by Maura McHugh and Daryl Gregory are also welcome additions to my bookshelf. And as far as new novels go, I was very impressed with The Enterprise of Death by Jesse Bullington, a marriage of historical fiction and dark fantasy which worked to great effect. But perhaps the most exciting thing happening in the genre world right now, at least in terms of the mainstream, is the proliferation of quality genre television. Of particular note this year was Game of Thrones, a slow burn which proved irresistible by the end of the season, and also American Horror Story, one of the year's biggest surprises, a captivating family drama tucked into a terrifying haunted house story which will hopefully open the door for more risk-taking in horror on the big and small screens.

It was generally a very good year of reading for me, especially as I finished up coursework for my Master's degree and encountered a lot of new things, such as Nausea by Sartre, Jealousy by Robbe-Grillet, and, strangely enough, my first Faulkner novel, The Sound and the Fury. Now I embark on a thesis about fantasy and Nabokov's Pale Fire, among other things.

Meanwhile I also read a bunch of great books for pleasure such as Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem (already one of my favorite New York novels), St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell (a fantastic short story collection), and Creatures, an amazing anthology of monster fiction edited by John Langan and Paul Tremblay, two of my favorite horror writers. So, lots of good stuff! And I also spent some time revisiting early Stephen King novels, finding that my affection for the man's work remains strong.

On the personal front, I published six new stories this year (two to professional venues) and one reprint, along with selling a reprint to an anthology forthcoming in 2012. And I still have a few stories about to make the rounds, which I've written at various points over the course of the past year. Very happy with 2011 on the writing front, and hoping for more of the same in 2012.

A (weird) review...

A review over at Diabolical Plots of my Daily Science Fiction story, "This Always Happens Here," is generally pretty positive; the reviewer calls it a "good thought piece" with a "Rod Serling feel," a "pretty good metaphor for the facade of reality," all of which I'm certainly happy to hear. However he also mentions that there are some "alternative lifestyle undertones in this story that may turn some people off." The alternative lifestyle referred to is, like many of my other stories, that of men being gay, mostly incidentally as it were, which is how I perceive it in the real world, too: an incidental part of someone's identity. The fact that it might turn some people off is, I suppose, a sad reality that must be faced, but nonetheless the fact that the reviewer felt the need to "warn" potential readers is definitely off-putting.

Ah, well. If alternative lifestyle undertones don't turn you off, you can read the story online here.