zonkered.net

Bitch Magazine has an interview with Sarah and Candy of Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, and it’s pretty awesome.  My favorite quote from it is, undoubtedly:

MV: Why should feminists read romance novels?

SW: It’s a 50-plus-year-old industry comprised mostly of women writers operating their own businesses and producing a genre about women’s self-actualization, pursuit of autonomy, and acquisition of sexual agency for an audience made mostly of women, who buy over $1.4 billion dollars worth of books a year. No, no, nothing feminist or even subversive about that.

If more people thought of it in these terms, maybe romance would cease being viewed as the most sexist, anti-feminist literary genre out there.  It’s not even close to being that; science fiction and fantasy, in my opinion, wins that one hands down – this is, after all, a genre where its acceptable for Harlan Ellison to grope a female author on stage and pass it off as a joke.

There’s also some interesting discussion of Mandy Van Deven’s use of ‘smut books’ to describe romance novels.  I kind of agree with people who don’t really like the use of that term, but in my case it doesn’t have anything to do with the ‘derogatory’ connotations of the word – I use smut myself to describe my own erotic/pornographic writing.  My problem with it is that it’s…not accurate.  For one, does any novel with explicit sex count as pornographic now?  If so, I have a long list of more ‘literary’ novels that I’ll now be referring to as smut.

And there’s a second problem with the use of the word – not all romance even fits into Mandy’s own definition.  There’s more than one subgenre where the sex is either nonexplicit or nonexistent.  Where do these books fit?

But all in all, a really awesome article, and I’m glad to be seeing coverage of romance in the feminist press, if only so that the next time the fact that I admit to reading Claudia Dain and Sherrilyn Kenyon, I can have links to send to feminist friends who roll their eyes and accuse me of being counterproductive to the cause.

Yeah.  It happens.

So it’s that time of year again.  Another crop of prospective library school students have been accepted to their programs, and in between trying to find affordable housing in Madison/Urbana/Ann Arbor/Austin/Pittsburgh/LA/Seattle/every other hipster-y enclave in the US, they’re worrying about how hard library school will be.

And people are agreeing with them.  Seriously.

Okay, I’ll admit this much: I did, in fact, pull my very first all-nighter while at Madison for graduate school.  Did I spend it putting the finishing touches on my network design project? No.  Did I spend it improving my grasp of the Library of Congress classification system? Nope.  Finishing my paper on the use of MCSH and LCSH in periodical indexing? Not that either.

Did I spend it writing epicly overwrought Prince of Tennis fanfiction? Um, yuuuuup.

Here’s the thing, people: you will learn things in library school.  Cataloging may well cause you to pull your hair out.  Your practicum supervisor may well drive you insane.  Job hunting will be pretty much hellish.

This will not be the hardest thing you do academically.  By a long shot.  Compared to my undergrad, grad school was like a very expensive, two year long break.  Yeah, I had classes.  Yeah, I had to work – two jobs at once for most of that time.  But I was never stressed over the school part.  Ever.

Entirely unrelated: WORDPRESS.  TELL ME WHEN I HAVE COMMENTS IN MODERATION.  In other words, Ealasaid, your comment’s been approved.  Finally.