Black Gate

Last week I had no figures at hand regarding children and teen reading rates. A 2007 National Endowment of the Humanities report on the topic is available here in pdf format (number 47). The short version is that the reading rate is not declining for children, but that as teenagers increasing numbers of kids stop reading. The 20-page executive summary does not define what they mean by “literary reading,” but in the summary for report 46, it’s given as “The reading of novels, short stories, poetry, or drama in any print format, including the Internet. Any type was admitted, from romance novels to classical poetry.”

Also, I inadvertently posted an outdated bestseller list. Here is the most recent PW children’s fiction list online; the ABA’s indie children’s bestseller lists overlap but are not identical. Both are heavily weighted toward fantasy, and this is even more true of the series lists.

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Yesterday (my yesterday; I’m 8 hours ahead of EST) Theo asked about subgenre preferences. I write in several different subgenres ranging from mythological fantasy to hard sf, and all writing is difficult, as far as I’m concerned. I do think there are differences, but first, a quibble, terminological or semantic as you prefer: all fiction is fantasy. Those of us of Indoeuropean linguistic and cultural affiliation participate in a set of related literary traditions who knows how many millennia deep, in which there are major narrative genres consisting of stories not considered true. This isn’t so in all other parts of the world. …

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There’s recently been a bit of discussion here about kids reading sf/f. I spent some time this morning looking up sales figures for children’s and YA speculative fiction, to discover that the most detailed information is in market reports that you have to pay for. Still, a few points.

First, no argument that gaming is a huge and growing market. I recall hearing recently that it has now surpassed movies in the entertainment hierarchy, but whether this was in terms of total dollars or percentage of people who consume, I can’t now remember.

The percentage of kids who read is still in decline, though I haven’t seen recent figures. As population grows, the total number of kids who read seems to be going up, however, or the kids who do read are reading more, as book sales are rising.

“In recent years, children’s books have emerged as a welcome bright spot in the world of general bookselling”; children’s books are helping to keep indy bookstores afloat.

And here is relatively recent publishing market data: “Total unit sales fell 6.7% in the week ended Dec. 7, 2008, compared to the week ended Dece. 9, 2007, according to BookScan. The adult segment had the worst week; adult nonfiction units were off 20.9% at the outlets that report data to BookScan. Juvenile fiction continued to be the strongest segment, with units up 24.1%.”

The most recent overview I could find was a couple of years old; the gist is that kids are not getting tired of fantasy and in fact are demanding more. “HarperCollins children’s publisher Susan Katz points out what she sees as a key difference. ‘It’s not our experience that the kids are saturated [with fantasy],’ she says. ‘It’s more that book buyers are.'”

The most recent children’s bestseller lists show a bunch of fantasy titles in every number category. …

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I love maps.

I’m not talking about the Tolkein-esque pseudo-quaint maps that seem required in a certain kind of fantasy. I mean real maps, new, old, or ancient, representations of the things in the landscape that had meaning for their makers. I love maps of places I know and places I don’t know. When it’s a place you know, I suppose the pleasure lies in re-experiencing the familiar in a new way. Like looking at a Google Earth view of your neighborhood: hey, there’s the park, there’s the coffee shop corner, there’s my front porch. When it’s a place you don’t know, there’s romance in visualizing it, there is charm and mystery in the unfamiliar place names, you can feel transported to a new land in the way the best fantasy does. Maps both tell you where you are, and take you to a place you’ve never been, sparking your longing to explore. …

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Do you think the undead are more interesting when:

a) beautiful
b) grotesque
c) both

Can’t do a real poll here, unfortunately.

My parents owned a book from the first King Tut exhibit to come to the US that held a fearful fascination for me. As a kid I loved reading about the discovery of the tomb and the contents and the strange family of Akhenaten, the heretic, and oh, those beautiful gods and divine animals made of gold, lapis, and cornelian… but I had to turn the pages very carefully to avoid the photo of Ay’s mummy’s head, which gave me nightmares every time my gaze fell on it.

In graduate school, part of the core curriculum was a human osteology practicum. Among other things we had to learn how to distinguish human from animal bone fragments. That and other physical anthropology classes were held in “the bone lab,” where shelves of skulls gazed down from three sides and a human brain sat behind you on the lab bench in a covered beaker of formaldehyde. Along the bench were drawers labeled “Quakers,” mixed fragments from an old Philadelphia graveyard that had been removed (IIRC) from one of the downtown parks. It was all pretty creepy at first, but I got desensitized. One of my classmates took bones home sometimes to study. I mean, a freakin’ human femur sticking out of his book bag, and the guards never said anything.

Then, a few years later, I started working in the Penn Museum’s collections. Between American ethnographic storage (in the basement of the now-old new wing), and the bulk of American archaeological storage (in a sub-basement that could only be reached from an elevator in the old building) lay the Mummy Corridor. …

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A few years ago, for one of Brian Swann’s anthologies of traditional Native American literature, I translated a quasi-historical story from Kwakwaka’wakw oral tradition that contained in it an episode in which a dead man is brought back to life by wolves. One of the English word choices I struggled with was the term the revivified character later used to describe why the wolves had done it.

Stories about wolves resurrecting the dead permeate older bodies of Kwakwaka’wakw story, and range from ancestor myths to first-person accounts of shamanic initiation. The myths have a subgenre featuring adolescent heroes who go out into the wild, enter the spirit realm, encounter dangerous and beneficient beings–not infrequently dying and resurrecting in the process–and return home with spiritual treasures. Does that not sound just a little bit Campbellian?

One problem with seeing this subgenre as more evidence of the universality of Campbell’s monomyth is that the genre as a whole also has stories featuring magical children and stories featuring mature heroes, each of which has a characteristic structure that is distinct from the adventures of the adolescent hero. …

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As an anthropologist specializing among other things in myth and folk literature, and as a writer who has sat on many a con panel on myth, fairy tales, quest stories and the like, I often have to wrassle the monsters Monomyth, Universal Archetype, and their lesser-known littermates, who have been spawned by Joseph Campbell and other Jung-influenced writers.

The monomyth, a word Campbell took from James Joyce, is essentially a proposed universal structure underlying the hero’s journey, with phases that include The Call to Adventure, Refusal of the Call, Supernatural Aid, Crossing the Threshold (into the magical realm), and so on. What’s wrong with the monomyth? There’s no doubt that pieces of it are found not only in a huge percentage of fantasy fiction, but also in widely scattered mythic and folk literary traditions all over the world.

However. Is it universal?

Methodologically, what both Campbell and Jung have done is cherry-picking, and often from texts that have already been translated and/or rewritten to conform to Western notions of what makes a satisfying story. Let me start with an example of the latter. …

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A rather entertaining comment on the cross-posted version of my last week’s entry takes up the subject of women’s roller derby skating in relation to the woman warrior.

Venturing onto another tributary of the Great River that is the topic of realism, a few years back I heard Rudy Rucker give a pretty interesting GoH talk at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. The talk was called called “Seek the Gnarl,” and the pdf file can be found here. (Wow, his site is blocked by the UAE government! I wonder whether it’s for “offense against religion” or “hacking and malicious codes”…)

Basically, Rucker’s talk was about predictability and lack of it in fiction, and how fiction should strive–in plot, character, setting, and so on–for the complex beauty of chaotic structures like flowing water or tree bark. Those structures are what he calls gnarl. Too much unpredictability and we don’t feel the aesthetic satisfactions of pattern; too much predictability and it’s flat and boring.

A lot of genre readers might take issue with where he puts realism in his various tables–might feel that the problem with a lot of mimetic fiction is that it’s too boring and predictable. (I’d argue RR is talking about realism as a literary technique rather than as a marketing category, and that he means certain specific things by “mimetic realism” not necessarily found in so-called mainstream fiction, but that’s a rather long digression.)

When I heard the talk, I didn’t feel the concept of gnarl was completely adequate to describe the mix of familiarity and surprise possessed by really satisfying fiction. I’ve always liked Kenneth Burke on “the arousal and satisfaction of expectations” in fiction, and what I find interesting about that concept is the way that as readers we can be so completely satisfied by something utterly unexpected. We love surprises and reversals, obstacles appearing at unexpected times or in unexpected ways, a different reality suddenly ghosting into solidity out of what have now been proved to be mere appearances. The maguffin is a fake, the villain is your father, the first-person narrator is the one who dunit. But the satisfaction arises out of the feeling that a pattern, an arc, has been completed–it’s just one we couldn’t at first perceive. We’re outraged by surprise if it we can’t fit it into an aesthetic whole. So the most satisfying “arousal and satisfaction of expectations” comes from complex flows and overlays of pattern–competing patterns that combine in unpredictable ways, or unfold and transform one into another. In other words, we’re back to gnarl.

(The last few paragraphs are taken from an from old and longer LJ post of mine.)

I had thought to dive today into Joseph Campbell on the hero and the so-called monomyth–another irritant that, one could wish, might aid in the production of a pearl of wisdom. I have been distracted, however, by a self-labeled polemic on the topic of fictional women as kick-ass fighters that referenced my post of two weeks ago. Which put me in mind of a long-running, intermittent sort-of argument I’ve had with the most excellent sf writer Ann Zeddies, a long-time student of tae kwon do, as to whether women really could go up against men in combat and win before the invention of that great equalizer, the gun. My position is yes, provisionally.

Tomoe Gozen, 12th-century female samurai.

First of all, let me say that I mostly agree with the aforementioned polemic (which is not on the subject of women fighters generally). I certainly agree that Laila Ali’s physique is much more believable for a woman fighter than the lollipop figure favored in Hollywood actresses (huge head, stick neck and body). Secondly, let me say that I have no street cred as a fighter. In my 25+ years in the martial arts, I’ve never used it outside the dojo, unless you count last summer when I tripped hard on the sidewalk and actually rolled instead of landing in a bone-breaking crash. However, one of my seniors had come to our aikido school as a street fighter–in a South Philly gang, family members in the mob, etc.–and also after many years in other martial arts, so I feel free to rely on his insights and conclusions. Moreover, though this was in dojo conditions–meaning at the minimum that you know you are about to be attacked–I have many times successfully thrown and/or pinned men who are significantly taller, heavier, and stronger. So my thoughts on women fighters are not totally pulled out of a dark and hidden orifice.

All people, male or female, have physical limitations. …

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