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FAIL Blog

BEST ROCK SINGER
Elvis Presley could sing in any style and genre– gospel, country, pop, r&b, rock, even mock-opera. His voice had great range. Yet the one rock n’ roll singer Elvis was in awe of was Jackie Wilson. Hear a number of his recordings and you see that only a few others even come close. I put Presley at #2, the fabulous Roy Orbison #3.

AttackingtheDemi-Puppets

WHEN I WAS AWAKENED by the sound of helicopters some minutes ago, I instantly knew what was happening. It’d rained all evening. A perfect time for the police to shut down the Philadelphia encampment.

According to the radio, hundreds of police are surrounding the remaining fifty Occupiers at Dilworth Plaza. Buses are parked nearby to take them to jail. Should I go down there to try to view? I don’t know. . . .

Are the Occupiers troublemakers, or are they heroes?

To me, any sign of dissent in this locked-down hyperregulated society is heroic.

AttackingtheDemi-Puppets

As Sarah is saying over at Romance University today, this is conference season for romance scholars as well as for romance authors and fans. Eric was the organiser of a session on “Foreign Affairs: Romance at the Boundaries” at the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA)’s World Literature, Comparative Literature conference, held from March 31 – April 3, 2011. Among the papers on offer were:

• Eric Selinger, DePaul U: “Shards of Lyric, Tales of Love: The Poetry of Popular Romance”
• Pamela Regis, McDaniel College: “Pamela Crosses the Atlantic”
• An Goris, U of Leuven: “Otherness and Self: Body, Mind and Romantic Love in Nora Roberts’ Popular Romance Novels”
• Guy Foster, Bowdoin College: “What to Read When Your Inner Tomboy is a Homo: Exploring Feminine Pleasure in M/M Gay Romance Fictions”

Still to come, there’s the joint 2011 Popular Culture Association (PCA) and American Culture Association (ACA) conference, being held in San Antonio from April 20-23, 2011. There will be a number of sessions on romance. Where there is no summary for the whole session, I have included a very short summary of each paper and linked to the full synopsis.

Alternative Historicals: Sheikh Romance
Session Chair: Amy Burge

• Dr Hsu-Ming Teo, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia: “Middle Eastern Realities and Orientalist Romances: History, Imperialism, and Regional Crises in Late Twentieth-Century Sheik Romance Novels.”
• Emily A. Haddad, University of South Dakota: “Harlequin ‘Presents’ Anglo-American Involvement in the Middle East at the End of the George W. Bush Administration.”
• Amy Burge, University of York, UK: “Dangerous Desire: Sexuality, Ethnicity and Miscegenation in Contemporary Sheikh Mills & Boon Romance and The King of Tars”

The title of the panel, ‘Alternative Historicals: Sheikh Romance’ is intended to indicate the unique ways in which sheikh romance deals in and with history and is suggestive of the idea that sheikh romances might be considered as a kind of ‘alternative’ historical, precisely because of its use of ‘history’. Furthermore the three papers each consider historical aspects of sheikh romance: Hsu-Ming Teo is looking at the relationship between conflict in the Middle East and the growth of the sheikh genre; Emily Haddad is considering the sheikh novel in a post-9/11 historical context; and Amy Burge’s paper compares sheikh romance with a Middle English romance,The King of Tars.

Romance From the Past: Genre, Race, Rape, and Narrative Structure
Session Chair: Sarah Frantz

• Christine Bolus-Reichert, Associate Professor, University of Toronto: “Knight-Errantry for Women: Du Maurier’s Romances Reconsidered.” Bolus-Reichert will be reassessing “the popular romances that kept Du Maurier’s name alive and her books on the shelves of public libraries: Jamaica Inn (1936), Rebecca (1938), and Frenchman’s Creek (1941).”
• Katherine H. Lee, Indiana State University: “Love, ‘Oriental’-Style: Reconsiderations of the Romance Novel and Early Asian American Literature.” Lee focuses on the work of Winnifred Eaton, a Canadian-born author “Of biracial descent (Chinese-British)” who published under the pseudonym “Onoto Watanna” and whose novel, “A Japanese Nightingale, [...] sold 200,000 copies, was published in France, England, and Spain, and adapted for the Broadway stage. It was the second in what would be a total of seven similarly-themed novels, published between 1898 and 1922.”
• Angela Toscano, University of Utah: “To Suffer a Sea-change: shipwrecks, pirates and the precondition of adventure in romance.” Toscano looks “at three examples of shipwreck and piracy as instances of the relationship between seascape and adventure [...]: Heliodorus’ Aethiopika, Laura London’s The Windflower, and Meredith Duran’s The Duke of Shadows.”
• Sarah Frantz, Fayetteville State University: “The Rapist Hero and the Female Imagination.” Sarah Frantz begins “the process of examining the construction, history, contexts, transformations, power, and appeal of the hero of modern popular romance novels” and will “posit the rapist hero as a historically-specific, nationally-situated response to the social upheaval in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s.”

Formula and Conventions: Cover Art, Nora Roberts, Translations and Happy Ending
Session Chair: Darcy Martin

• Lindsay Hayes, University of Oaklahoma: “A Passionate Embrace: Semiotics of Romance Novel Cover Art.” Hayes “utilizes elements of visual semiotics to explore what message is sent to the potential reader as well as how that message is conveyed.”
• Darcy Martin, East Tennessee State University: “Formula for Success: As Developed in Nora Roberts’ Saga of the MacGregors.” Martin is “looking at the idea of success seen through the lens of romance writer – Nora’s life” and “exploring the reasons for [...] continuing popularity that lasts several decades.”
• Katarzyna Nowicka, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan Poland: “How to romance the masses? Problems of translating light romantic fiction in Poland.” Nowicka’s paper “will centre around the problematic notion of transediting which is inherent in the translation of Harlequin formula fiction in Poland.”
• Carmine Pierre-Dufour, Syracuse University: “Breaking the Formula: Unconventional Endings in Romantic Comedies.” “The rationale behind this [Pierre-Dufour's] research project was to come to a better understanding of the reactions and responses of audiences to unconventional endings in romantic comedies.”

Genre and Romance: Young Adult Literature, Westerns, Urban Fantasy, and Gaming
Session Chair: Darcy Martin

• Maryan Wherry, Black Hawk College: “Romantic West v. Western Romance.” Wherry argues that “many of the romances are more ‘western’ than the westerns.”
• Mallory Jagodzinski, Bowling Green State University: ““But He Doesn’t Count”: An Examination of Adolescent Romantic Relationships in E. Lockhart’s The Boyfriend List.” Jagodzinski is “particularly interested in how an adult represents romantic relationships for a younger audience as messages about how to conduct romantic relationships can be rather pedantic in young adult literature.”
• Esther Guenat, Temple College: “Romance with ‘Street Cred’: Exploring Genre Fiction ‘Hybrids’.” Guenat’s “paper will focus on the Fever series by Karen Marie Moning, the Black Dagger Brotherhood series by J.R. Ward, and the Dark-Hunter series by Sherrilyn Kenyon, three authors who started out writing paranormal romances before transitioning to a style more indicative of urban fantasy, and how their current (and future) works effectively demonstrate a genre-crossing/blending that readers have come to appreciate and even demand.”
• Johansen Quijano, University of Texas at Arlington: “Romance Evolved: An Exploration of Romance in the Digital Narratives of Lunar, Final Fantasy and Ar-Tonelico.” Quijano’s “paper will look at how the digital narratives of Lunar and Final Fantasy portray notions of young adult romance and paranormal romance, and how the digital narrative Ar-Tonelico portrays sexual tension in what is unquestionably a tale of romantic love.”

Beauty and the Beasts of Romance, Real and Imagined: Animal Studies, Bestiality, and Fairytales
Session Chair: Darcy Martin

• Linda J. Lee, University of Pennsylvania: “Shifting Codes of Difference: Stigmatizing the Beautiful and the Monstrous in Popular Romance.” Lee will “examine the way that monstrosity and beauty are recontextualized in romance novels where monstrosity is overtly cast as disfigurement.”
• Taylor Moorman, Montana State University: “The Pleasures of Tension: The Erotic Attraction of the Beauty and Beast Dichotomy in Popular Romance Novels.” Moorman will “focus on Linda Jones’ DeButy and the Beast from the Lovespell’s Faerie Tale series, Silhouette’s Nighttime Sweethearts by Cara Colter and Teresa Medeiros’s, The Bride and the Beast. These texts center around notions of compromise, healing, and the breaking down of perceived barriers, concepts nearly as central to the romance genre as an emotionally fulfilling ending.”
• Nadine Farghaly, University of Salzburg, Austria: “Claiming the Human: Bestiality and Zoophilia in Romance Novels.” Farghaly states that “it needs to be acknowledged that there is one trait that seems to belong dominantly to paranormal romance fiction, zoophilia. Using Katie MacAllister’s Silver Dragon and Aisling Grey series and J.R. Ward’s Black Dagger Brotherhood series this paper analyzes how these authors reshape and reinterpret the aspects about bestiality in their stories.”
• Antonia Losano, Middlebury College: “Must Love Dogs: Animals in Romance and Romance in Animal Studies.” Losano “wish[es] to [...] explore here the representation of love of companion animals (mainly dogs, although this is part of a larger project which thus far looks at dogs, cats, some horses, and one marten) in 20^th century mainstream heterosexual romance fiction, using Heyer, Roberts and Crusie as exemplars.”

Nudity, Infidelity, Celibacy, and Kink in Popular Romance Media
Session Chair: Sarah Frantz

• Patrycja Wawryka, University of Ottawa: “Making Ripples: Women and Infidelity in Sex and the City 2.” Wawryka will be asking “how important is fidelity in achieving a successful relationship? As a highly accessible and popular source of entertainment, what general messages can be discerned from the film about “making ripples” in a relationship?”
• Amber Botts, Neodesha High School: “It IS Just Like Riding a Bike: Showalter and Cole’s Sexy & Celibate Immortal Heroes.” Botts wonders why heroes who “are celibate for centuries (sometimes up to thousands of years). A few are even thousand-year-old virgins” are so popular: “Feminist role reversal serves as one answer. Jung’s connections between fairy tales and the collective unconscious offer another, and sociological study of constructed meanings of romantic love and virginity offer a third reason why these immortal heroes can be both celibate and sexy.”
• Claire Dalmyn, York University: “The Gimp in the Relationship: The Troubled Romance of Kink and Popular Culture.” Dalmyn “will focus in particular on ways representations of kink in mainstream media both stigmatize and celebrate the experiences and values of kink people as deviations from a “vanilla” norm, and ways that kink communities in turn embrace or refute particular representations.”

The Study of Romance: Aesthetics, Aca-Fandom, Theories, and the Structure of Romance
Session Chair: Eric Selinger

• Catherine Roach, The University of Alabama: “Aca-Fandom and Deep Participant-Observation: Negotiating the Insider-Outsider Tension in Popular Romance Studies.” Roach “identifies and analyses tensions among various subsets of the romance fiction community (as constituted primarily around the organizations Romance Writers of America and the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance), in order to explore the question of how an academic interested in popular romance fiction may best study the genre.”
• Eric Selinger, DePaul University: “Dead Women are Not Romantic: When Popular Romance Meets Literary Tradition.” Selinger thinks it is “time to attend to the self-conscious engagements with literary and artistic tradition in popular romance fiction—not just as the sites of socio-political resistance, but as instances of a heretofore underappreciated aesthetic complexity” and will therefore “detail the metatextual pleasures to be found in [...] Welcome to Temptation, by Jennifer Crusie, and Natural Born Charmer, by Susan Elizabeth Phillips.”
• Theresa Stevens, Romance Professional: “Lost in Austen: When a Romance is Not a Romance.” Stevens believes that Lost in Austen is “a useful tool for examining the competing theories of romance” because “No matter which of the several romance structure models we apply to Lost in Austen (including those proposed by Pamela Regis, Leslie Wainger, and Billy Mernit, among others), ultimately, the story can’t be held to conform to any of them.”
• Barbara Cicardo, University of Louisiana at Lafayette: “Infrastructure Reversed: Extratextuality in Kasey Michaels’s St. Just Series.” Cicardo examines Kasey Michaels’s Maggie Kelly series, in which “one modern literary theory on textuality is turned outward from itself. The omniscient narrator sets the plotline first, cognizant of him/herself? as writer. Then Maggie Kelly, fictional author and protagonist of the novel, begins the actual story.”

Identity Crises: Heteronormativity, Social Conventions, and Gender
Session Chair: Darcy Martin

• Meredith Faust, DePaul University: “A ‘strange, primitive feeling of lust’: Heteronormative Rigidity in Herendeen’s Phyllida and the Brotherhood of Philander.” Faust “plan[s] to demonstrate that within the confines of Herendeen’s novel, and more specifically within the sex scenes of the novel, that the gender portrayals are not entirely subversive, but that they are more complicated than a representative / subversive binary.”
• Jayashree Kamble, University of Minnesota: ” ‘I Don’t Know What That Means’: Temperance Brennan as uncomprehending romance heroine in TV’s Bones.” Kamble argues that Temperance Brennan’s “incomprehension of the demands of romance narrative is portrayed as evidence of clinical dissociation, i.e., as a symptom of a behavioral personality disorder related to childhood trauma. This move allows the imperative of eros interruptus that is vital to television drama to stave off the pressure to make Brennan a romance heroine.”
• Ashley Festa, Our Lady of the Lake University: “Selling That Loving Feeling: Who Are Romantic Advertisements Really Targeting?” Festa observes that “Some advertisements [...] appear to use romance to sell products to men, either speaking directly to men or promoting products only men can use. In my research, I will analyze whom these ads are effectively targeting and whether advertisers are aware of whom their ads are hitting. I believe women are the audience these types of commercials are affecting, whether or not they were intended for women.”

Queering the Romantic Heroine: Past, Present, and Future
Session Chair: Katherine Lynch

• Katherine Lynch, SUNY Rockland: “One Small Step for Romance: The Evolution of the Queer Female Hero.”
• Ruth Sternglantz, Editor, Bold Strokes Books: “Where the Wild Things Are: Contemporary Lesbian Romance and the Undomesticated Queer Hero.”
• Lynda Sandoval, Romance Author: “The Queer Heroine as a Reimagined Reflection.”
• Len Barot, Founder/President – Bold Strokes Books: “Queering the Alpha.”

Dr. Katherine E. Lynch will trace the evolution of the queer romantic heroine in print, television, and film. Within the past decade, the rise of the queer female hero as a viable love interest reflects the rapidly changing landscape of sexual identity politics in early twenty-first century America. In “Where the Wild Things Are: Contemporary Lesbian Romance and the Undomesticated Queer Hero,” Dr. Ruth Sternglantz and Carsen Taite will argue that while the domestication of dangerous women in traditional romance (going back to the medieval period) was designed to diminish their queerness and bring them in line with societal expectations, in contemporary lesbian romance love enables queer women to embrace every aspect of their queerness. In “The Queer Heroine as a Re-imagined Reflection,” Lynda Sandoval will explore the ways in which queer heroines both converge with and diverge from their heterosexual counterparts within the genre of traditional romance. And in “Queering the Alpha,” Len Barot will map the ways in which contemporary female heroes in the sub-genres of lesbian intrigue and paranormal romances have adapted the characteristics of the alpha male of the traditional heterosexual romance.

There will also be an

Open Forum: The State of Popular Romance Scholarship

Open discussion about the current state of romance studies, including: the progress of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance, the past and future publication of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies, IASPR’s conference in New York City in July 2011, in Toronto in October 2012, and in Istanbul in 2013, the planned Popular Romance Studies Special Issue of the Journal of American Culture in 2013, and current Call For Papers for popular romance-themed anthologies or academic monographs.

and a

Special Session: Authors and Performers

Romance professionals — both authors and performers — discuss their careers, their motivations, the highs and lows of their experiences in their industries, and why they wouldn’t do anything else.

After that there’s the annual IASPR conference. This year it’s taking place in New York from the 26th-28th of June.

Teach Me Tonight

When my son was diagnosed with autism, my entire world turned upside down. My one and only priority was to do whatever I had to do to help him. Our every day struggles with simple tasks, the constant tantrums over obstacles that are invisible to my eyes seemed to be insurmountable 6 months ago.Today I have peace.

My son will make his way in this world, I am certain of that. My mother and the many therapists always praise me for the time and effort I have put in, but all the glory belongs to my beautiful boy. In 6 months time he has made progress that I wouldn’t even believe if I hadn’t witnessed it for myself. He has the full support of me, my husband, and his little sister. We’ve learned to be patient. We’ve learned that we are a unit operating and feeding off our love for one another.

To those battling and facing the struggle, don’t ever give up. Don’t ever look back. Every day is a new opportunity, don’t waste one single second of it.

Just Whatever

Art by Alex Grey

Questions and answers are as meaningless as the people who ask and answer them. People search for the meaning of existence and their contribution to it because they have nothing else to do. We are not fighting for our lives everyday, we are not focused on survival 24/7 like most other creatures. We have heating, blankets, food stores, even the true environmentalist like hobos can survive with ease if they plan properly. The thing is we’re bored, so we make up stuff like meaning and quality and fate and destiny and purpose, all of which is personal and relative. one person’s idea of destiny can be totally different than someone elses and so on. but I mean when it comes down to it all, where do you think you came from, some higher human like being? How about apes? How about dirt? Everything you eat comes from dirt and water. In fact, dirt helps sustain all life on earth… Do you?

So perhaps 42 is just a completely random number that some weird guy happened to think of while contemplating what the worst possible response to the meaning of everything could be and perhaps by choosing a number that made no sense at all it would in turn be the best possible answer, for it holds no real meaning what so ever, just like all of us.

Glitter: The Unity College Fantasy Literature & Philosophy Blog

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from the recent internet outbreak of speculation about OMG!why? do “straight” women read and/or write romances about gay men (LINKS: OUT magazine article that started it all, Gawker’s response, Lambda’s original response, Erastes’ response to Gawker, TeddyPig’s response, Gehayi’s response, Victoria Brownworth’s Lambda-sponsored response that is the subject of this post), it’s that everyone has their niche to fill and their script to follow and that everyone does an admirable job of doing precisely that.

Cintra Wilson fills her role of (apparently) being snide and supercilious quite well in the original OUT article. I can’t quite make out her stance on the issue, but I do appreciate that she let Beecroft and Erastes mostly talk for themselves, despite how wrong the headline-writer originally was in calling Erastes and Beecroft “straight”. Gawker does a great job of being snarky and impenetrable. I’ve read their response four times and canNOT make out which side of the issue the author is arguing from. In the comments to Brownworth’s hatchet job (which, OMG, you fall into them and never get out), Paul Bens does a great job of following his self-imposed script AND of cuing the scripts other people follow as if it were somehow their contractual obligation. They, of course, oblige with his cues. The layers of irony are mind-boggling.

And I will now fulfill my role, follow my script, say the predictable thing that I always say because of my own particular obsession and the position from which I’m commenting. At least I know I’m doing it—that should count for something, right? But I’ll say it anyway, because, like the other commenters, I’m convinced that my piece needs to be said and recognized by everyone else, even if no one really listens because they’re caught in their own little circular script.

I’m discussing here the Brownworth article in particular, not only because it’s the most desperately defensive but also because she’s the new voice in the debate. As I said, Erastes, Beecroft, Bens, Gehayi, even Lambda in their original article (schizophrenic as it is) all fulfill their predetermined script/role. But Brownworth is a new voice, a voice backed by an extensive resume that she doesn’t hesitate to wield rather indiscriminately. And it was her arguments that were the most egregiously incorrect, badly written, and offensive, which was disappointing precisely because of her credentials as a writer and a journalist.

Teach Me Tonight