Common Sense Media

Recently I meandered over to the Barnes & Noble website, and I noticed two things: First, you can now get free shipping on orders exceeding $25 dollars (sound familiar?) and second, there are now advisory ratings on YA media courtesy of a company named Common Sense Media. This is the preamble to their beliefs:

Media is fun and our kids love it. We also know that kids now spend so much time absorbing its messages and images that it has become "the other parent" in their lives. We started this organization because we know families need trustworthy information to help manage their kids' media lives.

What follows is a list of ten beliefs, the first reads: "We believe in media sanity, not censorship". If you want a more elaborate cross-section of what this company does, there's a handful of other excellent blogs google will direct you to if you search for it, but as always this blog is for my thoughts. This isn't journalism. I also really don't want to get into the quagmire of parental philosophy.

The first thing to address is their principle tenant: "media sanity, not censorship". First, what is media sanity? It sounds wonderful. It sounds like a call for an end to propaganda and the rebirth of honesty. Except what do they consider propaganda? Well. Common Sense Media judges content based on the presence of Role models, Violence, Sex, Language, Consumerism, and Drinking/drugs/smoking in media. Therefore media sanity is the judicious consideration over the exposure of these very real, ubiquitous, theoretically negative elements of modern culture. Sounds like something we were just discussing, doesn't it?

So that's media sanity. Censorship is defined as "the act or practice of censoring"; Censor is defined (second usage) as "any person who supervises the manners or morality of others". Without making any kind of judgement call on the aforesaid material, I think we can safely assume that Common Sense Media is in fact a censor. Even if we were to define censorship as the willful, physical withholding of information, which I can only assume they must, it can at least be said that they enable censorship by providing families with their "trustworthy information."

Now that we've dispelled that misunderstanding, let's take a closer look at the preamble to their list of beliefs:

We also know that kids now spend so much time absorbing its messages and images that it has become "the other parent" in their lives.

I believe the operative word here is messages. The criteria they evaluate (that which I listed above: Role models, Violence, etc.) is compiled into an overall ranking under "messages". Simply, what's being communicated. Smart thinking. Let's make sure the author/creator has something positive or important to say, and not something destructive or harmful.

But there's a problem here. Let's look at Common Sense Media's evaluation of John Green's Printz Award winning (That's the award for YA literature, by the way) Looking for Alaska. It only has a two out of five smiley faces in Messages. That's a little confusing as John Green's Looking For Alaska is an emotional coming-of-age story that, if memory serves [it's been about two years], is about the heartbreaking difficulty of truly understanding another human being. It's an important message, and even more so for young adults when being understood is yearned for, and the act of trying to understand others falls victim to adolescent self-absorption. That's something important and positive, not something "iffy" for ages 15-18.

The problem with Common Sense Media's system is that they associate the sheer presence of what they deem negative as a poor message, and ignore what an author is legitimately communicating. They have, as so many of the systems do, taken thinking out of the equation. These people not only assume young adults can't determine right from wrong when they're shown it, but actually can't do it themselves. It's not the presence of violence or drugs that's wrong but to what end its presence is used for.

Common Sense Media acknowledges media's place as "the other parent" but ignores that parents teach. If a family goes out to dinner, they'll pass a smoker, see someone drinking, and if the night is particularly wild maybe even something sexual or violent. These things exist. They just do. You can't help that, and so it becomes what you communicate to your children in the presence of these things that's important.

Media sanity, not censorship. It's a wonderful notion, but the kind of parent who grooms a purity-ring-wearing zombie, or naive paper doll can't appreciate it. These aren't thinking people, and neither are the people at Common Sense Media. Congratulations on your new partnership with Barnes & Noble. Let's hope the book buying public has enough common sense to keep your mindless Puritanism away from their children.

Zach Galifianakis interviews John Wray

John Wray, author of The Right Hand of Sleep, Canaan's Tongue, and Lowboy, which I reviewed on my old blog, sits down with Zach Galifianakis for the best interview ever.

Lowboy is out in paperback now. I enjoyed all three of Wray's novels, but if I had make a recommendation I'd tell you Lowboy is the most accessable, Canaan's Tongue the most interesting, and The Right Hand of Sleep the best in a technical sense.

George Williams' Degenerate

Degenerate

by George Williams

(10: 8/50, N: 1/10)

"It was the dumbest show I'd ever seen. No such New York existed, nor could it, even if it wanted to. It was New York's greatness not to endure such people. I imagined the hollow dummies run down by laughing cab drivers, who back up to finish the job."

The entry below will openly analyse George Williams' Degenerate and address specifically its possible themes, symbols, and intent. No plot-related spoilers will be divulged.

It's difficult for me to begin this entry for a handful of reasons. Surprisingly, I'm not wrestling with an urge to be more kind or more objective, but rather trying to resist the urge to write an out-and-out book review. This blog will be sloppy. You have been warned.

Here's what Degenerate (pronounced however you choose, really) is: A stark, critical examination of a decaying America. Set upon a pre-millennial backdrop, with the end of the 20th century in full-view, it carries the reader across a country littered with museums and graveyards and infected by lusty adolescence. It depicts a stubborn, obstinate culture that refuses to acknowledge its age, and foreshadows a dim future for subsequent generations. Thematically, it's a challenging, and arguably important novel but you can't bet the house on a theme.

Degenerate's narrative is a tenuous, off-putting thing that, when functioning at its best, resembles something like a middle-of-the-road crime novel, not in the quality of the prose, but in the structure and overall effectiveness of the narrative. Nothing in the novel ever feels exactly solid: plot, as it were, seems to be non-concern for Williams. The story will travel the road it will, and check off thematic supports like they were road-side attractions. It's a confusing ride, quite honestly. The plot is convenient when it needs to be, and some things just sort of happened at some point. Chekhovian omissions, or reader's haze, I couldn't say. Probably a bit of both.

Williams, and I say this both as a reader and a former student, can also be a difficult pill to swallow. His opinions aren't always conventional; occasionally they can even seem out of touch with reality, but its their extremism that makes them fascinating, and often entertaining to read. The sitcom Friends (see above) is made reference to multiple times in the novel. Williams is likely the sole person in America with such disdain for the show, but he uses that disdain swimmingly.

I find myself asking: Who would I recommend this to? And the answer is anyone who hates modern American culture, and can tolerate literature that reads like a fever dream. I don't quite know what happened, how it happened, or exactly why it happened, but the reality painted is frightening and maybe worth it regardless. The late novel symbol of America is perhaps one of the most acute I've ever seen/heard/read.

Color me ambivalent, and excuse me if I fudge my amazon review.

Up next: Michael Chabon's The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

Jacket Praise

Would it surprise anyone if I said you can't exactly trust the quotes on a movie cover or a dust jacket? I hope not. Anytime you see a praise-filled quote, it always requires some scrutiny on the part of the reader to determine if the quote in question is legitimate. After all, every book or movie that has ever been released has at least one person in its corner.

I'm nearly half-way done with George Williams' Degenerate and because I'm personally acquainted with the author, I thought it would be interesting to evaluate the praise that decorates Williams' back cover. Let me say outright, this is not an attack on anyone involved. This stuff goes on with every new book published. My vantage point simply allows me to point these things out without excessive researching.

Most first editions, and in particular debut novel first editions, pull praise from every corner. Reviews for the book, obviously, haven't been written at the time of publication, so it's not uncommon to see praise from other authors. Here's the tricky thing: How do you get someone to read your book, much less say something nice about it? Well. You ask your friends, that's what you do.

Eric Miles Williamson, author of East Bay Grease, Two-Up, and Welcome to Oakland said of Williams' novel:

"... reads like Hemingway on benzedrine and steroids. Williams' razor-honed sentences explode like grenades, rivaling the best work of Cormac McCarthy."

Bloody impressive, right? Williamson not only compares Williams to two literary giants but describes his work, more or less as equatable. Williamson is the author of four books, his debut, East Bay Grease, being the most successful. I have never read Williamson, but I attended a reading of his work as a student at SCAD. An event primarily organized by George Williams. Williams has also taken to teaching Williamson's Two-Up in his Fiction I class, but thankfully, not while I was taking him.

I don't exactly know how these two know one another, but they certainly do. Williamson is also the editor of the Texas Review; which means even if he doesn't have out-and-out final say in book acquisition for Texas Review Press, Degenerate's publisher, he certain has pull.

I will skip the next two blurbs supplied by authors Tracy Daughtry and Larry Fondation, as I don't know if they have a relationship with Williams. The next quote comes from Adam Davies, author of The Frog King, Goodbye Lemon, and Mine All Mine:

"With his first novel George Williams has inserted himself into the pantheon of American visionaries somewhere between Cormac McCarthy and Richard Price."

A much more modest quote I think. It doesn't set up expectations by comparing the prose to that of literary luminaries (Note: American visionaries). It only suggests a significant, unique perspective on America. I have also had the opportunity to attend a reading of Mr. Davies work, specifically a chapter from Mine All Mine just prior to its publication. Davies was until recently a professor at the Savannah College of Art and Design, where Williams himself teaches. These two were colleagues for a number of years.

It also strikes me as very funny that three out of four of the quotes on the back of Degenerate reference Cormac McCarthy, whom I know from experience is one of, if not Williams' favorite authors. Even the authors (and books!) with single references such as Hemingway, Kerouac, and Nabokov rank near the top of literary totem pole for Williams. Can you imagine these folks commenting on his work aren't aware of that, given that I know it? How much easier is it to make those connections when you know the tissue is already there?

George Williams was my favorite professor in college. I'm so glad to be reading his work in print, and I wish him all the success in the world. You'll know my thoughts on his novel soon enough, but the jacket praise can't help but make me smile.

Jonathan Tropper's How to Talk to a Widower

How to Talk to a Widower

by Jonathan Tropper

(10: 7/50)

"I had a wife. Her name was Hailey. Now she's gone. And so am I."

The entry below will openly analyze Jonathan Tropper's How to Talk to a Widower and address specifically its possible themes, symbols and intent. No plot-related spoilers will be divulged.

In heated August, walking across the lot of a Rochester's cooperate copy Barnes & Noble, floating on the high of a book purchase, I had no way of knowing that the two attractive hardcovers in the bag at my side were in fact two copies of the exact same novel. All I knew at the time was that Amazon editors had selected Tropper's This is Where I Leave You as their book of the month, and that at $5.99, a hardcover copy of Tropper's How to Talk to a Widower was a steal.

In truth they're not exactly the same novel. This is Where I Leave You is a novel about the nature of family, cemented with an interest in grief. How to Talk to a Widower is a novel about grief, cemented with an interest in the nature of family. The redundancies in plot, situation, and tone hit the levels of Woody Allen, except that unfortunately Tropper doesn't have the skill, charm, or even the intelligence to make that okay.

A second reading of Tropper tares off the flimsy sheet of sensational sentimentalism that he uses to disguise his masturbatory fiction as something other than it is. The self-indulgent narrator an apparent default for Tropper, or worse, possibly only a standee for Tropper himself, immersed in the center of a sex-and-fist-fight narrative with a wet-dreameque happy ending spared from being obviously so only by its optimistic ambiguity.

We all want our dysfunctional families to come together at the crucial moment. We all want to live in a world where past the storm clouds are blue skies, where although no one will come out and say it-- the guy always gets the girl. We all want that, and Tropper is happy to dole it out in spoonfuls. It's so sweet it washes out the taste of his mediocre metaphors, and the irritating qualities of his generation X protagonist, but God help you if you go back for seconds. Once you realize you're eating sugar coated shit, nothing else tastes quite worse.

If Dan Brown is the literary world's mystery-thriller flick, Jonathan Tropper is its sticky sweet, zany feel-good movie. Here is just another gen X author, writing for a gen X protagonist, in what I can only call the gen X novel given its ubiquity. Tropper benefits from a juvenile sense of humor, and occasionally keen sense of observation but underneath, it's really all just more of the same.

Up Next: George Williams' Degenerate.

A Brief Note On Stephen King

Now. I do love Stephen King. The man has wit, he's- for good or for bad- the clearest literary decedent of Shirley Jackson, and something of a pop-culture icon. It's been a very long time since I've read a novel by Stephen King, but always look forward to his monthly column in Entertainment Weekly. That he is also willingly and openly critiques the writing of his peers make me love him more: It speaks to a lack of self-consciousness that we should all be so lucky to have. Our filter is really only for fear of open reflection on our own work, and Stephen King knows he's written some turds.

While I have cheered him in his unabashed criticism of Stephanie Meyer's Twilight, or even Dean Koonz, I really must point out: This man should probably refrain from making "best of the year" lists for movies.

Shockingly, the writer/director of Maximum Overdrive doesn't have the best cinematic taste. This is what King dubs A material:

10) 2012

09) Fantastic Mr. Fox

08) The Taking of Pelham 123

07) Law Abiding Citizen

06) District 9

05) The Reader

04) Disgrace

03) The Road

02) The Last House on the Left

01) The Hurt Locker

I'm all for a man expressing his opinion, but let's not throw around the word "Best." If you ever needed proof as to why a Stephen King screenplay has never worked out very well, I think it has just been found. By the way, in case you're curious, only six of those ten even hit the "fresh" mark on Rotten Tomatoes. Only three are above 85%.

Observations: Blogging

As with everything else, you only want to when you're not. You only have something to say when you don't have an outlet. As I sit here, dreaming up topics I could expound on, I feel a bit silly.

It's all well and good at the end of the year when you've got best of lists to throw together, or when you've just finished a book, but in these great expanses of time in between, what is a fellow to do?

I don't believe in the contrived. If I'm going to blog, I want to blog with purpose.

So, dear unnamed thing, I'm breaking off our commitment. I still want to see you, of course, but I can't take this guilt. I'll be around. We can still be friends. I just need some time to think of something to say.