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Reged: Feb 16 2004
Posts: 1181
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This thread is for feedback about Bone Women by Eliot Fintushel.
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Anonymous
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I guess I'm not the target audience for this one. I gave up.
I suspect it's Literature.
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Anonymous
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I really liked the first paragraph. It reads as good as some of the poetry around here--(if you just broke up the lines, wink, wink)--but I gradually lost my initial rush as (maybe) we spent too much time listening to the protag get all clever with himself. Definitely worth reading, though.
Ward
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Anonymous
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Mental masturbation...like poor art, meaningless to everyone except the author. Hey, everyone. Look at me smear myself in feces and call it SF! STRANGE HORIZONS, what were you thinking?
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Karen Meisner
Fiction Editor
Reged: Oct 15 2003
Posts: 27
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Well, obviously it was meaningful to someone besides the author, since we loved it enough to publish it. This one's a difficult piece, I suppose, not as straightforward as some of the stories we publish. I find it beautiful, the narrator riding the line between self-delusion and a painfully honest awareness of the truths that lie underneath. It's passionate and tragic and funny and deeply human, and the language reads to me like poetry. Sorry it didn't work for you, but that's how it goes sometimes.
Readers interested in the Inuit folktale of the Bone Woman (or Skeleton Woman) can read more about it in Estes' Women Who Run With The Wolves.
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Jules Noble
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Quote:
I guess I'm not the target audience for this one. I gave up.
Me too.
As a sometime stumbling poet I am inclined to sympathy to all writers, and was raised on W Boroughs and other non-sequential and indeed sometimes distasteful writing but this.....
Like my boss said to me long ago: Intro, Middle, End. Thus structure and plot. Where were they? What on earth was he trying to say?
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Anonymous
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Readers interested in the Inuit folktale of the Bone Woman (or Skeleton Woman) can read more about it in Estes' Women Who Run With The Wolves.
Well that what drew me too it and why I persisted so long in trying to read it. I know of the Bone Woman both from W W R W T W and from shamanistic dance work, but frankly I saw little connection between the powerful Mythos and the lost protagonist and shambling lovestruck girl
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It\'s me, Eliot!
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I know I shouldn't be doing this, but whatthehell, that other Eliot published footnotes to his Wasteland, yes? So why should I be above EXPLAINING things, huh? In a word, BONE WOMEN is about facticity--about the tension between what we human beings ARE and what human beings want or need to THINK of ourselves as being. So the main polarities/tensions in the story are those between (1) mendacity and truthfulness (2) fantasy and reality and (3) romantic or idealistic love and lust (or lust's dark twin, revulsion), or put it this way: (4) between our divine and our animal nature. I tried to manifest these tensions on three levels, in the events of the story, in the composition itself, and in the narrator's perorations around those events. The protagonist constantly tries to idealize himself and his desires, but he's not dishonest enough: he repeatedly catches himself at it, and then he suffers agonies of remorse and self-deprecation, which, of course, he dramatizes as extravagantly as the noble "love" he's seen through. He is unable to reconcile himself to the animal side of his own nature. It is true that the movement of the story is not a movement of plot. It IS a movement toward clarification of the nature of the dilemma, culminating in the most fundamental aspect of our facticity--death. This story's end is by no means the end of OUR story, in my view. It's certainly not the end of mine, anyway. In this story I wanted to frame what I think to be an important question about what we are, we humans. Half god, half mud. What of the mud, huh? What's that all about? How do we find the Great Conjunction of those two, the Heavenly Marriage? It is certainly possible for us, though the protagonist of this story, for all his poetry and aspiration and angst, has not yet quite reached the depth, "the rag and bone shop of the heart" from which some resolution can, at least, be envisioned. By the way, that I use my own name in this story--and that I mention a few places and situations I've been in--is theater. It is not autobiographical.
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Jules Noble
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Thankyou for replying to my comment. I am relieved to find that I did just about follow what you were trying to get at in your writing. I feel perhaps you ignored the literary equivalent of the 3 spice/flavours rule useful for cooks experimenting with new dishes. (If there are too many flavours the dish becomes unclear and can never be brought to perfection) and you list 4 pairs of polarities thus 8 'flavours'. If you were trying to tell a parable for ethical/moral purposes then surely clarity and thus simplicity is more important not less. But thanks anyway
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Meghan McCarron
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Whatever this story is AWESOME. Really, one of my faves of the year. Thanks SH for publishing it. This is what I come here for.
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RButcher
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I'd really hate for people to get so stuck in tradition that they can't enjoy a story that breaks a rule or two. But that being said, throw us some kind of bone, OK?
There were things I really liked in there, but the whole of it was fairly impenatrable. There were times I realized I had skipped quite a few lines. I would go back and read what I skipped, and sometimes the good stuff was in there...
If you don't give me some kind of structure, my brain will shut off. And I think it is a fairly good brain, with some flexibility in it. I know the Bone Woman myth was supposed to provide the structure, but it didn't.
The popsicle didn't freeze enough to stay on the stick, and now I can smell it, but I can't eat it no matter how much I want to.
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Anonymous
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I know I shouldn't be doing this, but whatthehell, that other Eliot published footnotes to his Wasteland, yes? So why should I be above EXPLAINING things, huh?
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I really appreciate that you did.
One of the joys of electronic publishing is this kind of dialogue. It's one of the reasons that I don't read print SF any more, but do read this.
The other is that SH takes more risks, publishes more unusual stuff - and even if I occasionally find a particular piece inaccessible , I am glad that it's there.
I also am glad the Fiction editor stepped in to defend the choice of story. For the same reasons.
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Alison
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It's a classy story, Eliot. For my money, a perceptive and expressive peeling of the mechanisms of fear and desire that constitute misogyny. What's this about beginnings, middles and ends? It starts, it has a middle, and a very powerful ending...Thanks, and I'd like to see more.
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M.K. Hobson
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I loved this. Absolutely loved it. Brilliant work, Mr. Fintushel.
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Anonymous
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I suspect so, too. And I don't think it's Speculative/Slipstream Literature, at that. I have to agree with others who wonder what Strange Horizons was up to this week.
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Anonymous
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Quote:
I guess I'm not the target audience for this one. I gave up.
I suspect it's Literature.
Post #2950 references the above.
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Anonymous
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I couldn't put it down. And found myself rereading it (a few times). More please.
Portnoy.
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Anonymous
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Eliot, if you have to explain it, as you did in previous post, then it's a failure. Thus, you prove your story a failure. Unreadable rubbish by all accounts.
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Karen Meisner
Fiction Editor
Reged: Oct 15 2003
Posts: 27
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What drives people to insist on dismissing stories they don't like as e.g. "unreadable... by all accounts", when it's been made perfectly clear that by many accounts, it's not only readable but wonderful? At least be accurate. It's unreadable by your account. By my account it's a treat.
Every reader has different tastes. Every reader looks for different things in fiction, and every reader may find (or fail to find) different things in a story. If a story's no good for you, that's fine, you're entitled to your opinion. (Though I think it's pretty wanky to post an anonymous message with no apparent purpose other than to insult the story and author.) But I hope you recognise that a story which fails for you while succeeding for many people is not inherently a failure. Other people are finding value in it that you are not finding. And sometimes a little commentary can help them find it. Fintushel didn't need to explain his story, but it's nice that he did, because maybe his comments helped the story become more accessible to other readers.
On a more general note: a lot of people seem to subscribe to the idea that a story shouldn't need explaining. I take your point, and in some cases I agree, but this hasn't always been my experience. There's a long tradition of terrific literature that's easier to appreciate when we can get a little help in understanding how to approach it. For example, if I'd never read any of the decades' worth of essays and criticism about James Joyce's Ulysses, I might never have gotten through more than a few paragraphs of what turned out to be a gorgeously moving, if difficult, book.
Incidentally, when Ulysses was published, Virginia Woolf said of it, "Never did I read such tosh" and "I don't believe that his method . . . means much more than cutting out the explanations and putting in the thoughts between dashes." Ouch! So I suppose that readers rudely dismissing the stuff they don't like is also part of a grand literary tradition. Hooray for carrying on in the footsteps of the greats!
(It would be amusing if the post before this one was an April Fool's joke, riffing off all the similar comments that have been made. But since it's typical of a type of post that does keep cropping up in the forum, I figured I might as well respond to it/them sincerely.)
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Anonymous
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Whoever wrote this 'Mental masturbation...like poor art, meaningless to everyone except the author. Hey, everyone. Look at me ...' I agree. The ‘story’, loath to call it such, is a childish attempt to be controversial. Editor's justification smacks of mutual appreciation society. How on Earth can you compare this to Joyce? This 'piece' does not have the integrity to be called literature. So if it is not literature, what is it? It sure as hell isn't decent fiction either since one of the primary roles of fiction is entertainment. This fails to entertain. We can all disregard the elements of fiction, plot, character etc. and write rubbish, calling it high art if we want to, that doesn't mean it is high art. Most cases, it means it's conceited trash. My opinion is as valid as any other. Editor, you need to remind yourself of this fact: most of the sycophants who frequent this forum, writing good replies, are hopeful writers desperate to win approval. Therefore their opinions are of 'no account'. Readers with no such fear of making ourselves disagreeable to the editors are free to speak our minds and the truth.
No doubt, this rubbish will be nominated for an award by the navel-gazing society, poor in taste, pathetically desperate to ingratiate.
Since, judging by your high praise of this rubbish, it appears you are impressed by Germanic sentence structure and wrong word choice and pretension, pseudo-intellectual Latinized prose, I was tempted to do the same, but that would make me a sycophant too.
James Bramfield.
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Anonymous
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Yes and it is too easy for the writers to come on here and praise their own stories anonymously, in a pathetic attempt to antidote the bad posts.
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Anonymous
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And why do the editors always feel they have to come to the rescue of the crappy writers they publish? If you're going to publish guano at least have the guts to take the flak graciously. These weedy excuses from editors defending their stories is pretty lame.
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Karen Meisner
Fiction Editor
Reged: Oct 15 2003
Posts: 27
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Anyone posting anonymous flames on the internet forfeits the right to talk about guts, by the way. That was kind of hilarious.
This is probably the last thing I'll say on the subject here, because I don't want to keep feeding the troll(s). But obviously I care for the fiction we publish. So when readers are having such strong reactions to it, I hold out the hope that maybe some of those people are actually interested in thinking about the story. That's why this forum exists, after all: so all of us who are interested in the work that's being published get a chance to talk about it. I am perhaps deluded in this, but I try to be optimistic.
I'm always pleased to see appreciative comments from our readers. But the main readers I was thinking of when I said the story succeeded were myself and my fellow editors who chose it. I can't speak for anyone else's take on it, but I know that whenever I read this story, it just knocks me out.
Some have complained that we editors must be impressed by some kind of abstract, complicated style thing, presumably because the complainers can't imagine what else we could have liked. In fact, what I like about the story comes down to a very simple gut response. I do like Fintushel's language, yes. But I like it because it works to tell a story that moves me, and is itself an important part of understanding the character who uses this elaborate language to hide behind. That unreliable narrator may well be pretentious, but the story, in my reading of it, is a sincere and moving portrait of a flawed, vulnerable person trying alternately to cover up and confront his failures. We are not encouraged to like the narrator but we are able to recognise his humanity, and that for me is a beautiful thing to get from a story, and a valuable purpose for fiction to serve.
Put another way: the story made me smile, and it made me sad, and it made me think about human beings with more compassion. So yeah, I think that's worthwhile.
"Wrong word choice" is high up on my list of things that do impress me, though, you got me there! Jed, we should make a note of that in the guidelines.
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Jed Hartman
Fiction Editor
Reged: Oct 15 2003
Posts: 152
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Hear, hear! I second everything Karen said about the story. Also, I did love the prose style in this. Nothing weird or abstract about that love: it just worked for me, on a gut level.
I do think James Bramfield deserves some credit, though, for putting his name on his criticism. Thanks for that, James, and I'm sorry to hear the story didn't work for you.
...On a more general note:
There's this weird thing that I see a lot in online discussion of published fiction: the idea that because a reader didn't like a given story, the story is Objectively Bad, and thus the editor must have had some improper reason for buying it. Sometimes that reason is that the author is a Big Name and the editor just wanted to sell more copies; sometimes that reason is that the content is Politically Correct and the editor was kowtowing to the forces of evil; sometimes that reason is that the editor is friends with the author.
All sorts of motives imputed to the editors, but readers quite often miss the real motive that's almost always what's really going on:
The editor spent their magazine's money to buy the story because they liked the story.
I know I must sound like a broken record by now, because I keep saying this. But people keep trying to claim that our motives must have been something different than what they were, so I feel like I need to repeat it every now and then.
(It's certainly an easy mistake to make; I often read stuff published by other editors and think "What was the editor thinking, to buy this crap?" But these days, I try to remind myself that the editor almost certainly liked the story, and may actually have loved it, and that there's a pretty good chance that a fair number of their readers will love it too, because different people have different tastes.)
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James Bramfield
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One final remark to make on the subject and I'll say no more.
The mutterings of the unbeneficed clergy do not trouble the members of a cathedral Chapter, who, in their arrogance, are blind to the truth.
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Anonymous
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The mutterings of the unbeneficed clergy do not trouble the members of a cathedral Chapter, who, in their arrogance, are blind to the truth.
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You assume that in this matter there is such a thing as Truth, rather than opinion or belief.
Poetry Consumer
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Anonymous
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I think you've misinterpreted Bramfeild's quote because you don't understand it.
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Hippo-nymous
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Opinion or belief are subjective. Truth is objective and universal. You are welcome to believe in a lie if you want. You are welcome to believe in your own misguided opinions too. That doesn't mean that you understand the truth.
Fiction is always a matter of truth -always- because Truth=Integrity. Without integrity what you are writing is trash. Mr Bramfield is correct. That story was conceited trash in the mode of 'Hey look at me, look how great I think I'm writing, blah blah blah, screw the reader's wants and needs, this is all about me etc. etc.'
And when the author of said rubbish compared himself to T.S Eliot -give over, for Heaven's Sake!
SH spare us this sort of rubbish in future, please.
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CarlS
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Reged: Nov 26 2007
Posts: 7
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Pretentious yes, and calculatedly so. Horrifying, hilarious, brilliant, full of pathos, vocabulary building. Takes me fully back to the sex-obsessed self-importance of being a too-smart too-mystical adolescent/young-adult who lacked the mentor that could explain hey, you’re just tragically deifying little girls in search of Woman, Anima, Goddess, etc. If I had read this in college I would have memorized lines of it as I did with The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by TS Eliot or Pale Fire by Nabokov. Or maybe not because the unromantic hostility would have been too shocking.
Readers who don’t like this story need to be reminded that there are other stories in the world for them. I am very glad that both the author and editors came into the forum to defend the piece. I’m a great fan of introductions and analyses, I think they’re a sign of strength and not weakness. I wish all the stories at SH got more backup/background explanation. I think it’s unnecessary to expect stories to stand on their own, that's how misappreciations and misunderstandings are fueled. We all do (or don’t) carry the cultural prerequisites for reading anything at all.
Now I googled about the Bone Woman and still don’t see how the Mexican myth of a goddess who reassembles skeletons and breaths life back into them relates to this story, it’s almost the antithesis here. Or maybe that’s the ironic point, or maybe I’ve got the wrong myth. So that’s my only complaint. If the story had explored the myth a bit more, critics who saw no fantastic/speculative content for SH would have been mollified.
Edited by CarlS (Thu Nov 29 2007 10:50 PM)
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Jed Hartman
Fiction Editor
Reged: Oct 15 2003
Posts: 152
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Thanks for the note, Carl!
Interesting point about introductions and analysis. I tend to be wary of them in magazines and anthologies; a lot of the time, what editors say about the stories strikes me as wrong, obvious, vague, and/or too spoilery. "In the tragic tale that follows, young Engelbert learns all too well the meaning of ... 'The Sorrow Of Ennui.'" And in many cases, there's not a lot that an editor can say about a story other than "I love this story--couldn't tell you why, it just spoke to me."
Relatedly, sometimes the author of a story we're considering tells us (usually in the cover letter) what they mean the story to be about, and fairly often we don't see the story as being about that at all.
That said, it's also true that when we editors discuss a story, often one of us will see the story in a way that the others don't, and that discussion can indeed help the others to appreciate the story. And as a reader, I do enjoy hearing what an author had in mind when they wrote a given (published) story, even if it's often not very connected to what I see in the completed story.
But in general, I think I'd rather see such discussion come from readers than from the editors and author; I think it's too easy for readers to read notes about the story and say "Oh, that's The Official And Only Meaning Of The Story" rather than "Oh, that's what some people think the meaning of the story is."
...As for the Mexican myth, I'm not familiar with that one. Eliot was explicitly referring to an Inuit story; it has various versions, but if you search for [Inuit skeleton woman tears] you'll probably find some of them. For example, there's a blog entry with one version of the story.
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Roderick
New user
Reged: Mar 03 2007
Posts: 11
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I'm surprised and a little dismayed at the rabid hostility I'm reading here, all over differing tastes and interpretations of what could be considered "speculative fiction." Since when did this genre become cast-iron and formulaic? Did I miss the memo?
Really. Grow up, kids. (This is coming from one not even old enough to buy a beer.)
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KNB
Regular reader
Reged: Oct 30 2006
Posts: 103
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Quote:
I'm surprised and a little dismayed at the rabid hostility I'm reading here, all over differing tastes and interpretations of what could be considered "speculative fiction." Since when did this genre become cast-iron and formulaic? Did I miss the memo?
Really. Grow up, kids. (This is coming from one not even old enough to buy a beer.)
I kind of agree that the point of spec-fic is at least sometimes to be controversial)...but controversy is always better than obscurity. Along with "no such thing as bad publicity" there's "no such thing as a bad debate."
There aren't too many stories here that engender 30+ posts.
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