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shalannaOkay, I guess everyone's right and I'm wrong: I'm undersexed.
By today's standards, at least. Judging by the actions of characters in modern novels, which is mostly what I have to go by, because the people I know don't think the same way that the "mainstream" must. (Or, if the Bush camp is correct, the larger portion of the nation wants things "cleaned up" and anything that's more than mere innuendo and suggestiveness eliminated. Actually, the FCC will probably go even further than that until the pendulum of public opinion/approval swings back, moderating things again.)
I have an excuse . . . for those who want to hear the entire speculation as to why my medical history explains that I probably am less sexual-being than intellectual-being. I think it's probably that my hormone levels are low. They're within normal range, although it wouldn't be surprising if they weren't. I spoke of going to the "Zap Palace" earlier. That's because several years ago, I had a benign pituitary adenoma that was surgically resected, and then three years later it was resected again and I had radiation to keep it from recurring. The radiation is what I believe affected my visual field, especially where they shot it through my left eye that first day when the technicians had a day off *sigh*. But since it did fix the problem, I suppose that's the price to pay. I went "through the change" even before the first surgery, because the hormone thing was crazy for a few years prior to that, but I don't think that's the reason.
As an adolescent, I used to be just as boy-crazy as the other girls, if not as active. I was always more of a romantic. But I certainly had lasting and/or fleeting attractions to movie stars or the guys I was in class with, etc. I don't believe, however, that I was ever as much of a sex-focused sex maniac as characters in books today are. Maybe I'm just . . . different. If I look a million miles away, I'm more likely to be deep in reverie about some philosophical, mathematical, or musical problem or idea. I could be working out a plot or character aspect for one of my books. Hearing lyrics to a song or inventing a melody. Inventing a puzzle. Or perhaps I'm composing a LiveJournal entry.
I'm not thinking about "getting it on."
Okay, well, once in a long while. Or if I'm watching Val Kilmer. I could so **** Val Kilmer. He reminds me of that college boyfriend I was so nutzo about--a good-looking, non-psychotic version of that guy, I mean. Even though, for all I know, Mr. Kilmer might have just as wacko a set of personality defects as Mr. NutJob had. (Okay, back then, I'll admit I had a pretty good set of neuroses going, as well--related both to my father's recent death AND to the endocrine problem I've described in the LJ cut, which had almost undoubtedly started back then, because it usually starts in adolescence. But still, I wasn't as crazy as him. Yet I digress.) Ralph Fiennes is nothing to sneeze at, either. I also have a "thing" for Ron Reagan. Yeah, I know, he can be kind of goofy, but that's what I love--I am often goofy. His wife seems to be a very nice person, so of course this is all theoretical. The POINT is (and I do have one, I *think*) that I'm not a completely dried-up prune. I'm just not always thinking about sex.
And that, I surmise, is one reason that I don't really get "into" Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum novels. (You KNEW I was leading up into talking about fiction!) I used to just say that I didn't "get" them or that she wasn't that good after the first few, but recently I decided to re-examine the novels, because they do seem to have such wide appeal, and I remembered liking the first one pretty well. It was after the second and third books that I said, "The plots are recycling and there's always the crazy grandmother, who'd never be able to physically endure the stunts she supposedly pulls, and it's just not very good." And that was my story and I stuck to it. But hey . . . on Wednesday I ran across a copy of Seven Up at the grocery store on clearance, and threw it into the basket for research. I'm always willing to rethink and second-guess myself. And I'm glad I did, because now I think I understand this much better, and also I no longer sit around brooding that she doesn't "write well," because I think she *DOES*. I think she is not growing as a writer as much as she should because she's not doing something different--which she is clearly capable of doing, but when you have a fan base and money coming in, what the hell?--but I take back anything nasty I may have said about her work in the past.
(I should note here that I am no threat to Janet Evanovich, even if I were to negatively review her book(s). I don't think she would even notice a gnat like me buzzing around for a moment to make some observation or another. Still, if she did hear of me and wished to make some nasty remark or other about my cruddy books, I would be happy to mail her a copy of the one that's in print or copies of any of my manuscripts. Any exposure is good exposure, and I would welcome anyone's comments. I may not agree with them, or may not implement all suggestions, but I don't mind hearing the stuff. So . . . turnabout would be fair play. This holds for anyone whose books I have mentioned here.)
I started the book saying, "Mundane opening. I'm making myself go on." Because the opening was pretty pedestrian. However, her prose has a flow to it (like mine *ahem*), and soon she got into something intriguing enough that I got carried along with it. She gets off a lot of good lines (albeit often suggestive ones--about which, more later) and she invents some neat metaphors and descriptive terms. There is nothing wrong with her prose. It's actually pretty good. In my world, that gets you a lot of points.
Also, her characters are distinct and interesting. I can see how the fan base would want to follow them. They're eccentrics, but just on the edge of believability, so that you can accept the wild antics they pull later on. Another point in her favor. (See, I said this would be a good review.)
That said, here's what I figured out. If you have not read any of her books, you may not want to read the following--it's a spoiler of sorts, I suppose.
Her viewpoint character thinks about everything in sexual terms. It appears that EVERYONE else does, as well. (Maybe even the priest, although all he does in this book is get drunk with the murderer and let the guy shoot off a gun in the church--that was not too believable.) Everyone's crotch is constantly tingling, warming up, etc. Perhaps it's because the characters and the setting are both "all about" a very blue-collar, working-class environment, where everyone works at a factory, at a bar, at a strip club, or selling cars, or is a cop, or a bounty hunter . . . I guess what I'm saying is, no one in this world seems to be a software engineer, a college professor, a deep thinker type, or a novelist (she gets extra credit for that, though--don't you hate most books about a writer who is writing a book?!? I do!!) They live for the sex and the drinking, in some sense. "Everybody's workin' for the weekend." They have no higher aspirations than to go to the kids' ball games, to the bar, even to the funeral parlor that is a fixture in all the books (which I find rather depressing, but I can see it fitting into the milieu.) This is probably what keeps SOME people reading, but keeps OTHERS of us at arm's length. We cringe . . . we squinch up our faces . . . we say, "Oh, come ON, PLEEEASE," but the inevitable focus is still on sex. And the metaphors. (You know that I did like when Grandma said that when she rode the Hawg, it made her privates tingle. That was an easy one. Of course you're going to laugh. But really, isn't it kind of . . . vulgar? I mean, isn't this mostly "groundlings" humor? Not slapstick all the time, but "mudbugs" all the time. It's a bit TOO much for me, since it's ALWAYS about sex, almost never about something funny in another sense.)
I am NOT saying this is bad. I AM saying that maybe I'm just not able to assume that mindset. And this doesn't make me Simon(e) Pure, nor does it make the people who love it "dirty." It did, however, color my reactions to her work.
{Perhaps all the people I meet are secretly thinking in exactly this way. (That would make a "telepathic" world noisy indeed.) But I don't believe this is the case.}
I will say that the plot in 7UP was too predictable to me, and I could see around the corners as each point was coming. There were minor twists and turns that surprised me a little, but most of the fun came out of the characters and their antics. The antics weren't so easy to believe, but since she had established from paragraph one that it was to be humorous (like Dave Barry's book that I discussed earlier), I accepted them more easily than I would have in a more serious-toned work. (I still don't think stun guns are anything to play with. Just because a person is your rival and she said your friend was fat, you stun her repeatedly? Stun guns/tasers can kill people. Anyone with a pacemaker, left/right bundle branch block, or another electrical problem in the body . . . I don't want to think about it. The cops used one on a six-year-old kid the other day, and it was on "Deborah Norville Tonight." I shuddered during the demo on a grown man.) I think that she could have had a really NEAT plot, though, one that she set up early in the book.
Okay, this is the real 7UP spoiler. Early in the book, Steph's sister comes home because her hubby has run away with the baby-sitter. He siphoned off their money to banks in the Caymans and went there to live. Now . . . would it not have been REALLY fun to read about how Steph and her fiance went there to try to track this guy down? Yes! It would have been a FAR more interesting romp than just the "old man in the burg is crazy" story. They could have taken along the stoner character, Mooner, for comic relief, using some excuse or other. That would have been a tougher book to write because of the research on how one might catch such a crook in a foreign land, where you have no credentials and her fiance is not a cop. But would it not have been a lot better?
However, hey. Maybe she'll do that plot in a later book. For all I know, she HAS. If not, I think she did miss an opportunity there. Don Westlake would have gone there, I'll bet. I just know that given that setup, he would, and it would have been something amazing to read.
This is not what I'd consider a glowing review, but neither is it an unfair slam, in my opinion. I'll say that the first book in the series was really good (to me), if I remember correctly (having run across it and read it when it first came out), because it was the first time we'd met these characters, and all this stuff was being set up. Now, when we meet a character, she goes back for a few paragraphs and explains who this character is and what happened before . . . a telling and not a showing. This is a typical way that series books have to be handled, but it's not always done that way--sometimes authors manage to show and not tell the stuff, and we still "get it." However, that's to be expected in a series. Part of the problem is that a series never moves that far ahead.
She did, however, make it possible again to sell COMIC NOVELS of any sort, which is another plus.
It'd be amazing to see her trying a different kind of novel. A mainstream book. Something completely different.
But that's not gonna happen, not while this series has the momentum that it does. That's a two-edged sword.
And it does cut both ways.
Still, when you collar the random person on the street (I'd like to meet Ms. Random sometime--she's gotta be pretty unusual) and ask who she'd rather be, me or J. E.--it's a complete no-brainer. So who am I to talk?
And why are you listening to my drivel? Go, go--there's something useful you're supposed to be doing.
But thanks for listening, anyway.
By today's standards, at least. Judging by the actions of characters in modern novels, which is mostly what I have to go by, because the people I know don't think the same way that the "mainstream" must. (Or, if the Bush camp is correct, the larger portion of the nation wants things "cleaned up" and anything that's more than mere innuendo and suggestiveness eliminated. Actually, the FCC will probably go even further than that until the pendulum of public opinion/approval swings back, moderating things again.)
I have an excuse . . . for those who want to hear the entire speculation as to why my medical history explains that I probably am less sexual-being than intellectual-being. I think it's probably that my hormone levels are low. They're within normal range, although it wouldn't be surprising if they weren't. I spoke of going to the "Zap Palace" earlier. That's because several years ago, I had a benign pituitary adenoma that was surgically resected, and then three years later it was resected again and I had radiation to keep it from recurring. The radiation is what I believe affected my visual field, especially where they shot it through my left eye that first day when the technicians had a day off *sigh*. But since it did fix the problem, I suppose that's the price to pay. I went "through the change" even before the first surgery, because the hormone thing was crazy for a few years prior to that, but I don't think that's the reason.
As an adolescent, I used to be just as boy-crazy as the other girls, if not as active. I was always more of a romantic. But I certainly had lasting and/or fleeting attractions to movie stars or the guys I was in class with, etc. I don't believe, however, that I was ever as much of a sex-focused sex maniac as characters in books today are. Maybe I'm just . . . different. If I look a million miles away, I'm more likely to be deep in reverie about some philosophical, mathematical, or musical problem or idea. I could be working out a plot or character aspect for one of my books. Hearing lyrics to a song or inventing a melody. Inventing a puzzle. Or perhaps I'm composing a LiveJournal entry.
I'm not thinking about "getting it on."
Okay, well, once in a long while. Or if I'm watching Val Kilmer. I could so **** Val Kilmer. He reminds me of that college boyfriend I was so nutzo about--a good-looking, non-psychotic version of that guy, I mean. Even though, for all I know, Mr. Kilmer might have just as wacko a set of personality defects as Mr. NutJob had. (Okay, back then, I'll admit I had a pretty good set of neuroses going, as well--related both to my father's recent death AND to the endocrine problem I've described in the LJ cut, which had almost undoubtedly started back then, because it usually starts in adolescence. But still, I wasn't as crazy as him. Yet I digress.) Ralph Fiennes is nothing to sneeze at, either. I also have a "thing" for Ron Reagan. Yeah, I know, he can be kind of goofy, but that's what I love--I am often goofy. His wife seems to be a very nice person, so of course this is all theoretical. The POINT is (and I do have one, I *think*) that I'm not a completely dried-up prune. I'm just not always thinking about sex.
And that, I surmise, is one reason that I don't really get "into" Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum novels. (You KNEW I was leading up into talking about fiction!) I used to just say that I didn't "get" them or that she wasn't that good after the first few, but recently I decided to re-examine the novels, because they do seem to have such wide appeal, and I remembered liking the first one pretty well. It was after the second and third books that I said, "The plots are recycling and there's always the crazy grandmother, who'd never be able to physically endure the stunts she supposedly pulls, and it's just not very good." And that was my story and I stuck to it. But hey . . . on Wednesday I ran across a copy of Seven Up at the grocery store on clearance, and threw it into the basket for research. I'm always willing to rethink and second-guess myself. And I'm glad I did, because now I think I understand this much better, and also I no longer sit around brooding that she doesn't "write well," because I think she *DOES*. I think she is not growing as a writer as much as she should because she's not doing something different--which she is clearly capable of doing, but when you have a fan base and money coming in, what the hell?--but I take back anything nasty I may have said about her work in the past.
(I should note here that I am no threat to Janet Evanovich, even if I were to negatively review her book(s). I don't think she would even notice a gnat like me buzzing around for a moment to make some observation or another. Still, if she did hear of me and wished to make some nasty remark or other about my cruddy books, I would be happy to mail her a copy of the one that's in print or copies of any of my manuscripts. Any exposure is good exposure, and I would welcome anyone's comments. I may not agree with them, or may not implement all suggestions, but I don't mind hearing the stuff. So . . . turnabout would be fair play. This holds for anyone whose books I have mentioned here.)
I started the book saying, "Mundane opening. I'm making myself go on." Because the opening was pretty pedestrian. However, her prose has a flow to it (like mine *ahem*), and soon she got into something intriguing enough that I got carried along with it. She gets off a lot of good lines (albeit often suggestive ones--about which, more later) and she invents some neat metaphors and descriptive terms. There is nothing wrong with her prose. It's actually pretty good. In my world, that gets you a lot of points.
Also, her characters are distinct and interesting. I can see how the fan base would want to follow them. They're eccentrics, but just on the edge of believability, so that you can accept the wild antics they pull later on. Another point in her favor. (See, I said this would be a good review.)
That said, here's what I figured out. If you have not read any of her books, you may not want to read the following--it's a spoiler of sorts, I suppose.
Her viewpoint character thinks about everything in sexual terms. It appears that EVERYONE else does, as well. (Maybe even the priest, although all he does in this book is get drunk with the murderer and let the guy shoot off a gun in the church--that was not too believable.) Everyone's crotch is constantly tingling, warming up, etc. Perhaps it's because the characters and the setting are both "all about" a very blue-collar, working-class environment, where everyone works at a factory, at a bar, at a strip club, or selling cars, or is a cop, or a bounty hunter . . . I guess what I'm saying is, no one in this world seems to be a software engineer, a college professor, a deep thinker type, or a novelist (she gets extra credit for that, though--don't you hate most books about a writer who is writing a book?!? I do!!) They live for the sex and the drinking, in some sense. "Everybody's workin' for the weekend." They have no higher aspirations than to go to the kids' ball games, to the bar, even to the funeral parlor that is a fixture in all the books (which I find rather depressing, but I can see it fitting into the milieu.) This is probably what keeps SOME people reading, but keeps OTHERS of us at arm's length. We cringe . . . we squinch up our faces . . . we say, "Oh, come ON, PLEEEASE," but the inevitable focus is still on sex. And the metaphors. (You know that I did like when Grandma said that when she rode the Hawg, it made her privates tingle. That was an easy one. Of course you're going to laugh. But really, isn't it kind of . . . vulgar? I mean, isn't this mostly "groundlings" humor? Not slapstick all the time, but "mudbugs" all the time. It's a bit TOO much for me, since it's ALWAYS about sex, almost never about something funny in another sense.)
I am NOT saying this is bad. I AM saying that maybe I'm just not able to assume that mindset. And this doesn't make me Simon(e) Pure, nor does it make the people who love it "dirty." It did, however, color my reactions to her work.
{Perhaps all the people I meet are secretly thinking in exactly this way. (That would make a "telepathic" world noisy indeed.) But I don't believe this is the case.}
I will say that the plot in 7UP was too predictable to me, and I could see around the corners as each point was coming. There were minor twists and turns that surprised me a little, but most of the fun came out of the characters and their antics. The antics weren't so easy to believe, but since she had established from paragraph one that it was to be humorous (like Dave Barry's book that I discussed earlier), I accepted them more easily than I would have in a more serious-toned work. (I still don't think stun guns are anything to play with. Just because a person is your rival and she said your friend was fat, you stun her repeatedly? Stun guns/tasers can kill people. Anyone with a pacemaker, left/right bundle branch block, or another electrical problem in the body . . . I don't want to think about it. The cops used one on a six-year-old kid the other day, and it was on "Deborah Norville Tonight." I shuddered during the demo on a grown man.) I think that she could have had a really NEAT plot, though, one that she set up early in the book.
Okay, this is the real 7UP spoiler. Early in the book, Steph's sister comes home because her hubby has run away with the baby-sitter. He siphoned off their money to banks in the Caymans and went there to live. Now . . . would it not have been REALLY fun to read about how Steph and her fiance went there to try to track this guy down? Yes! It would have been a FAR more interesting romp than just the "old man in the burg is crazy" story. They could have taken along the stoner character, Mooner, for comic relief, using some excuse or other. That would have been a tougher book to write because of the research on how one might catch such a crook in a foreign land, where you have no credentials and her fiance is not a cop. But would it not have been a lot better?
However, hey. Maybe she'll do that plot in a later book. For all I know, she HAS. If not, I think she did miss an opportunity there. Don Westlake would have gone there, I'll bet. I just know that given that setup, he would, and it would have been something amazing to read.
This is not what I'd consider a glowing review, but neither is it an unfair slam, in my opinion. I'll say that the first book in the series was really good (to me), if I remember correctly (having run across it and read it when it first came out), because it was the first time we'd met these characters, and all this stuff was being set up. Now, when we meet a character, she goes back for a few paragraphs and explains who this character is and what happened before . . . a telling and not a showing. This is a typical way that series books have to be handled, but it's not always done that way--sometimes authors manage to show and not tell the stuff, and we still "get it." However, that's to be expected in a series. Part of the problem is that a series never moves that far ahead.
She did, however, make it possible again to sell COMIC NOVELS of any sort, which is another plus.
It'd be amazing to see her trying a different kind of novel. A mainstream book. Something completely different.
But that's not gonna happen, not while this series has the momentum that it does. That's a two-edged sword.
And it does cut both ways.
Still, when you collar the random person on the street (I'd like to meet Ms. Random sometime--she's gotta be pretty unusual) and ask who she'd rather be, me or J. E.--it's a complete no-brainer. So who am I to talk?
And why are you listening to my drivel? Go, go--there's something useful you're supposed to be doing.
But thanks for listening, anyway.
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Date: 2004-11-21 01:51 pm (UTC)Exactly!!
Date: 2004-11-23 12:43 am (UTC)You're absolutely right. I've been musing on that now and then when I come across films and novels that make me wonder, "Do people really think like this? And, if so, how do they keep the interest up without getting bored?" After all, you can get off a couple of times, and then what? I mean, when that's over, there's got to be something more and different. *sigh*
There is SUCH an overemphasis on sex and how it "motivates everything" in modern American society. Some of this comes from advertising, I think ("sex sells"), and it has spilled over into the sitcoms, movies, and pop culture. Songs, as well. It's as if there is nothing else. It doesn't take the proper place as *part* of life, but is the seeming *focus* of life, which really confuses the teenagers and children who get the wrong idea and start having sex too early, before they're emotionally prepared, for the wrong reasons, and so forth. And then they're *really* mixed up.
You're right about platonic love being more lasting and something that people forget about. They're always saying that they'd like to make their friends into their lovers, but that's not always a good thing. You can have SO many more platonic friends that you keep forever.
It's the difference between "phileo" (brotherly love, love of friends) and "eros" (sexual attraction love) in the Greek. There's also "agape" (the unconditional love God has for everyone and vice versa, and that you ideally also feel toward your children and family) and "storge" (meaning the pat-on-back affection, shows of affection that aren't meant to lead to expressions using "eros," reassurance and friendly hand-squeezes to acknowledge shared humanity). "Eros" is all they seem to talk about. But "phileo" and "agape" are more important still, because they're in every other facet of life. People shouldn't discount these.
Re: Exactly!!
Date: 2004-11-23 10:37 am (UTC)And I agree about the influence of the media on sexual themes. It's getting harder these days to find a good movie that doesn't involve some kind of sweeping romance. Granted, if it's done well, I don't mind...but then again, there it is. It's a theme that gets used again and again, and for those who are too young to know better, the fantasy of it all in movies and such kind of puts across the idea that romantic love (and possibly sex) solve everything. You get these adolscents and teenagers in middle school and high school who just angst all the time about how they like so-and-so and how they NEED a boyfriend. It's become a type of social standing; one gets more respect if one has a significant other. And then, all too often, getting into such desperate relationships at a young age has a lot of these kids getting into sex before they're really ready, as you say.
And again, I don't know how familiar you are with the phenominom of fan fiction, but lately there's gotten to be this repeating theme a lot of people term "healing sex." Works like this: Character A and Character B are in an abusive relationship in which B eventually rapes A and leaves them. A is distraught, broken and feels as though they can never trust anyone again. Along comes Character C who is wonderful, perfect and through "healing sex", cures A of all their woes and pain. ...like more sex right after being raped is going to make things perfect. And that's not even covering the kind of real pscyological damage rape causes. I don't recall seeing this sort of thing in published books (although I read mostly sci-fi/fantasy where romance isn't the core theme), but it's being written over and over again in fan fics, typically by teenagers and adults who ought to know better.
Off on another tanget, here, I've also noticed in my years online that there's an increasing number of people trying internet relationships. I met my boyfriend that way, but we're a rare case. Most of those long distance things don't work out too well because they require a lot of patience and commitment. Those people trying this out are also getting younger and younger, resulting in drama on forums and chats. It all to often becomes a case of, "I love him so much, he's changed my entire life!" Suddenly, all happiness hinges on how often the significant other is online. If you try to warn them that things might not work out because there's no way two fourteen year olds can move in together at that age, they get angry with you. "You don't understand! I've never loved anyone like this before! Our love is so pure!" Sure. Right. As someone who's been with their boyfriend for over eight years now, I know love is more than a bit of snuggling and saying "Oh, it's okay" when you didn't pass a math test. The truest love comes from surviving not only the best of times together, but also the worst, whether it be financial problems, a chronic illness or a death in the family. It's also learning to live with someone else's quirks because regardless of what these kids might think, love isn't some super magical spell that automatically cures all and makes people live happily ever after for ever and ever. IMO, your significant other/spouse should not only be your lover, but your best friend.
Anyway... Platonic love. We could use more of it. I'll end with a quote from a friend's journal. The original post was actually in regards to how just because two people of the same gender are close, doesn't mean they're necessarily hot for each other. But I think the message is still pretty universal.
"Love is a sudden blaze which soon decays;
Friendship is like the sun's eternal rays.
Not daily benefits exhaust the flame,
It still is giving, and still burns the same."
~ John Gay
There can be love between people of the same gender -- or even opposite genders -- that is real, genuine, deep, lifelong...and platonic. There's no shame in loving a friend.
no subject
Date: 2004-11-24 09:54 pm (UTC)