Just bad enough to not be good

Pop Literature in the 21st Century


[NOTE: This was originally posted on the blog, "Are We There Yet?" To see the original blog post, please visit this link:]
http://matrix-hole.blogspot.com/2013/03/just-bad-enough-to-not-be-good.html

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“Hikaru kumo o tsukinuke furai a wei.”

-Japanese folk saying. Translation: “Rice must be cooked just right—neither too hard nor too soft. This is the manifestation of perfection.”

I’ll be frank with you, dear reader—I am an avid collector of bad literature.

I am a literary crap enthusiast. Like the young Joseph Smith in upstate New York, I take my proverbial shovel in hand and head out into the woods, searching for those golden tablets of text that are a cut above the rest. There is a unique quality to exceptionally bad writing: if it crosses a certain threshold, it suddenly becomes immensely fun to read. I feel that the scale of “good to bad writing” is not a continuum; rather, it is horseshoe shaped, with good and bad nearly meeting at the bottom. Some books are so bad that they are able to jump that synapse and cross over into Awesome Territory.

One such book was a little gem I stumbled upon last year titled “Leave the Wine Glass Lay”. A friend of mine met the author in person—he came to her unannounced, like the Angel Moroni, to tell her about his literary opus. The author assured my friend, with a self-important air about him, that his book would be “the next big thing”. She went online and checked the book’s description on Amazon—and then immediately sent me an e-mail marked urgent, with a link and the comment, “you have to buy this book”.

As soon as I read the Amazon synopsis of “Leave the Wine Glass Lay”, I knew that I had struck gold.

Three things stuck out to me:

1. The modifier “all kinds of” is used twice in the first paragraph of the description. The main character, a powerful wizard, has “all kinds of magical powers” and encounters “all kinds of characters”.

2. By the second paragraph, we already have a full fledged cluster-eff of pronouns.

“He befriends a 10-yr-old child, Laden, who finds the Evil Wine Glass at the seashore and invites him and his family to dinner along with his friends.”

Whose family? Whose friends? Which he is who? Zuh?

3. The author went to the trouble of writing a quote of recommendation for himself. Unfortunately, he couldn’t think of anybody to attribute this quote to. All we have, at the end of the book’s description, is this:

“This story is unlike any other and author Jackie O Brien is truly unique by writing this story.”

I should note: that quote is also on the back cover of the book itself. In the print version, however, the author was nice enough to add some quotation marks—but still no person to whom the compliment is attributed. The punctuation itself appears to beg of us, “Come on, guys, honest, somebody said that. Look—there’s punctuation marks around it!”

That’s right, dear reader—I purchased this book.

And it was worth every penny. It truly was so bad that it became amazing. Where to begin? Well, how about at the beginning. Seriously, the first sentence of the book already has major verb tense confusion:

“I am the wizard Translucence and the year was 1503.”

The punctuation is devil-may-care and haphazard, as are the spelling and grammar. “Its” and “it’s” are used interchangeably, as are “they’re”, “there” and “their”. At several points throughout the book, the author appears to have forgotten what he’d already said—or lost the ability to scroll up on his word processor—and inserts sudden interjections like, “oh, but did I mention”, and “oh, I forgot to say such-and-such”. Some words are inexplicably capitalized, only to be written lowercase later in the text.

The descriptive language is just as avant garde in nature. This is one of my favorite quotes:

"Another enchantment, I instantly thought as the veins on my neck puffed in horror."

I have no idea what “neck veins puffing in horror” looks like, but I imagine something akin to a bullfrog when threatened.

And the story itself. Oh, dear, sweet Lord, the story. It jumps around, introducing plot developments suddenly and without warning. The entire thing appears to have been written in one sitting, the author overcome with the white heat of drunken inspiration. “Leave the Wine Glass Lay” truly jumps the gap between good and bad, moving with Nietzschean boldness into that netherworld beyond good and evil.

But oh, did I mention that “Leave the Wine Glass Lay” wasn’t the initial book I came here to discuss, dear reader? No, the book that truly makes my neck veins puff up in horror is none other than “Fifty Shades of Grey”.

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The above-quoted Japanese proverb illustrates the ideal of perfection—something that walks that delicate balance between hard and soft, undercooked and overcooked—in Japanese culture. It is my opinion that the same principle applies to something that is of poor quality. For writing to be truly bad, it can’t be overly bad, like Jackie O Brien’s book of wizardly adventures. His book is too bad to really even be considered bad, in my opinion. Nay, I believe that truly bad writing must be just bad enough to frustrate the reader without amusing him/her.

Enter “Fifty Shades of Grey”, stage left.

The most infuriating thing about the entire “Fifty Shades” trilogy is that it walks that delicate, Japanese line of balance and equilibrium. It is not nearly good enough to be worth reading. However, it is not quite bad enough to be entertaining. “Fifty Shades” is just bad enough to be truly bad writing—drab, poorly constructed, unsophisticated. Its badness is, well—grey.

I am reminded of M. Scott Peck’s description of evil as “gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring”. [People of the Lie, p. 264.] And of C. S. Lewis’s depiction of Hell as a gray, drizzly English city with nothing particularly interesting about it. True evil is not exciting or interesting—it is uncreative and pedestrian.

Perhaps more infuriating than its mundane badness, however, is the fact that people pay money for “Fifty Shades”. At least “Leave the Wine Glass Lay” has been left “laying” on the shelf. E. L. James’s erotica stories have become a cultural phenomenon, sparking a mini-industry of merchandise, knock-offs, parodies, late night talk show references, and even involving the participation of Gilbert Gottfried.

Well, if you can’t beat them, join them. 

I decided to climb on board the sticky, dubiously-stained bandwagon of the “Fifty Shades” phenomenon and write a satirical work of my own. My book, “Pirates of the Danube”, is not a direct parody of the S & M trilogy per se, however; rather, it is an homage to an entire genre of rambling romance-erotica tales. It is part “Fifty Shades”, part Harlequin romance, part “Leave the Wine Glass Lay”, and 100% awesome.

And it will be available for free this weekend. See here for details.

-David J. Schmidt

*One note on the Japanese proverb quoted above:

I wasn’t able to find the actual folk proverb, so I just inserted a quote from the opening credits to the Japanese cartoon Dragonball Z instead. But I swear, that proverb about properly cooked rice exists somewhere in Japan—a real Japanese man told it to me once, while he shared a bottle of vodka with me in southern Russia. But that’s a different story for a different time.

Please check out the blog "are we there yet", where this was originally published. You shan't regret it.

http://matrix-hole.blogspot.com/ 

Rape in the Congo

Love in the 21st Century

[This blog was also published on Jo Bryant's blog, and on "Reader's Entertainment". To see the guest posts, click the links below:]

http://jobryantnz.wordpress.com/2013/03/21/rape-in-the-congo-love-in-the-21st-century/

http://www.readersentertainment.com/blog/2013/love-in-the-21st-century-by-david-j-schmidt/

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I open up my e-mail inbox one morning to find that the first message on the list bears the following title:

“THIS MONDAY—RAPE IN THE CONGO!”

Of course, after I open the e-mail, I realize that it comes from an activist group that is inviting me to a special event where they will screen a documentary about some humanitarian crisis in Africa.

But the first thought that came to my head, when I saw that email, was this:

Who can afford a plane ticket to the Congo in this economy? Much less stomach all the raping?

I blame “Fifty Shades of Grey” for this.

In part, I hold the “Fifty Shades” phenomenon responsible because, in this day and age, violent sex is on everybody’s minds. It’s all the vogue. It seems that no matter where we turn lately, bruises are the coolest new thing to wear. Bella wakes up after her wedding night with Edward Cullen to find her body bruised and sore, and she is filled with love for her new husband. Anastasia meets a man who tells her he wants to put metal projectiles inside of her, and she instantly falls for him. “You had me at ‘projectiles’,” she says.

It used to be, the violence was at least kept subtle and implicit in films and books. You watch one of these old black and white movies from the 1940’s, and sure, the men do a lot of tough talking, but they keep it classy for the most part. I recently watched “Double Indemnity”, a film noir from 1944. Sure, the main character is always pulling women around by the upper arm to get them to go along with him, as if they had no sense of agency of their own, or were incapable of responding to a simple, verbal “hey, come over here please”. Sure, the lead male has a habit of fiercely shaking his love interest by the shoulders as a prelude to kissing her.

But at least nobody is waking up with bruises in the morning, or having metal balls put inside their nether-regions.

In the 21^st Century, on the other hand, we have Twilight and Fifty Shades.

We have Edward Cullen, a husband who is “special” and “magical” and sparkles in the sunlight—and, because he is special and magical and sparkly, his wife is forced to cut off all contact with her friends and family once she marries him. Because nothing says “loving relationship” like a man who won’t let you call your dad on the phone.

We have Christian Grey, who makes you sign a contract regulating when you can touch yourself, who monitors what you eat meticulously.

All that’s missing is for Christian Grey and Edward Cullen to sex their respective lovers to the tune of Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique” like Julia Roberts’ evil husband in “Sleeping with the Enemy”.

But this isn’t the only problem I blame on the “Fifty Shades” phenomenon.

I also hold “Fifty Shades” and its kin responsible for my confusion. My misunderstanding of the aforementioned email—and the vagueness of the email’s title itself—are the direct result of these books, as they have normalized imprecise language. More than the bizarre sexual practices, the poor syntax is, perhaps, the most disturbing thing about the whole “Fifty Shades” series.

The Congo isn’t the only thing being raped these days—the entire English language takes a beating when something like “Fifty Shades” becomes popularized.

Every time Christian Grey says a phrase like “thank fuck”—as if Fuck were some commonly accepted deity to whom we offer thanks and praise—I feel as if King Leopold of Belgium is marching his troops into the pristine wilderness of the English language, rampaging through the countryside and mining the soil of our language for blood diamonds.

Every time E. L. James carpet bombs her narrative with ubiquitous ellipses, raining down a maelstrom of fire on the punctuation, I feel the English language shrivel up and die inside.

Every time her main character says “oh my”; with every non sequitur in the plot development, with every nonsensical metaphor and simile, the defenseless English language is ravaged like a nation being colonized.

In the face of such devastation, I did the only thing any sensible person would do—I launched a counterattack, via parody. My novella, “Pirates of the Danube”, is a work of comic farce which satirizes the entire lot of barely-legible erotic and romance stories which have taken us by storm. It is humanity’s last stand, in the face of almost certain literary demise.

And it will be free this weekend.

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"Pirates of the Danube" will be free for download on Kindle this weekend, March 23 and 24. See the book in the Kindle store for details. 

Now please, do yourself a favor and go check out Jo Bryant's lovely blog. She is awesome, and she is an Aussie - Kiwi, making her exponentially more awesome.

And feel free to check out Reader's Entertainment for more book-related juiciness. 

Ghost Hunting: Slave Graveyard in Georgia

We pull up in front of a small Baptist church off the main road, just outside of Athens, Georgia. My brother leads us through some thick brush into the woods behind the parking lot. At the edge of the woods, there are a couple of modern gravestones.

We walk further into the woods. The last light of twilight is on the horizon.

Standing amidst the dark trees, we notice nothing out of the ordinary…at first. If you take a closer look at the ground, however, you will see them.

The graves. Where the slaves were buried.

They are barely recognizable—shallow depressions in the earth, just the size of a human body. All these years later, the earth still sinks down over the final resting places of these people. An unmarked flat stone has been placed at the head of each grave, the only manmade marker the tombs have received.

As we stand amidst the ancient stones and cold pine trees, my brother explains how he found out about the slave graveyard.