Some Thoughts On Genre

Some books. American 20th
century writers.

A friend once asked me if I shelf my science fiction books apart from “literature.” I don’t actually recognize a separate category called “literature,” and my books are shelved in Library of Congress order. This means that writers are grouped by historical period, not their names, or the intent of their fiction. It would get muddy otherwise. Should you lump Charles Dickens, a writer for the masses, in with the popular fiction, despite that his work is taught as literature today.[1] I shelve Dickens in with the other Victorians.

I read something today that I think got genre a bit wrong.[2] In his view, genre fiction puts character subordinate to plot. I could doubtless fill his home with genre works that gratify that opinion. He noted that (and I will quote here) that “people are good or bad (sometimes evil)” (I"m quoting, but not naming. I have my reasons.) And I could fill his home with genre works that refute that claim.

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Beowulf: A Long-Expected Translation

It’s been known for years that J.R.R. Tolkien had prepared a prose translation of Beowulf, but this was not among his published works until now. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is calling this a “new” translation, though considering that the author has been dead for forty-one years, and bulk of the translation dates from 1926, this would seem to stretch the meaning of the word “new.” Many of the earlier published translations of Beowulf were begun significantly later.

Beowulf is, of course, a much-translated work. Fourteen years ago, when Seamus Heany’s verse translation of Beowulf was published, I called my local Barnes & Noble to see if they had it in stock. The clerk asked me for the book title. “The book is Beowulf, but you’ll want to look under the translator’s name, Seamus Heaney.” He insisted on looking it up by title.

There was a long pause. “There are a lot of books with that title.”

“Yes there are. You’ll want to look under Heaney. That’s H-E-A-N-E-Y.”

“I don’t see anything by a ‘Shay-muss’ Heaney, but we do have a ‘See-Am-Us’ Heaney. Is that the same guy.” Happily, they had the book.

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The Knight in the Hellish Court - Faerie Queene, Book 1, Canto 4

The Seven Deadly Sins

The Redcrosse Knight is a bit of a sap. First he gets duped twice by the Enchanter, now in the fourth canto, we learn that he's being lead astray by Duessa. It's a good thing his armor is enchanted to protect him for harm or he'd be in real trouble.

Duessa takes him to the house of Pride. She is chief among the Seven Deadly Sins, the rest of whom are her courtiers. The classic list of the sins from Pope Gregory I runs in this order:

• Lust
• Gluttony
• Avarice
• Sloth
• Wrath
• Envy
• Pride

But Spenser has his own sequence. He starts with Pride, who rides in a carriage drawn by peacocks. Each of the other six rides on a symbolic beast. Spenser puts them in this order:

• Pride - carriage drawn by peacocks
• Idleness - rides an ass
• Gluttony - rides a pig
• Lechery - rides a goat
• Avarice - rides a camel
• Envy - rides a wolf
• Wrath - rides a lion

At the end of this little parade, comes Satan himself. For that matter, Pride is described as the daughter "of griesly Pluto" and "sad Proserpina, the Queene of hell," and gets the name "Lucifera." But with the exception of Pride, who is described as "wondrous faire, as any living wight," the rest of the court is described as being (not to overuse the word) monstrous.

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No need for speed when you read

Over at Language Log, Professor Julie Sedivy of the University of Calgary writes about speed reading. I've always been a fast reader (if I want to slow down, I just pull something off the shelf that isn't in English). I remember being told in first grade that I couldn't have finished the in-class reading assignment yet (and so I started reading everything twice).

Of course, there's no prize for getting to the end of War and Peace, and if you're not going to understand or retain any of it, there are better things to do with your time. And that, according to Professor Sedivy, is the problem with speed reading apps. She looks at one called Spritz.

Spritz provides a new-ish twist on the same speed reading promises by creating an app that streams text within a small viewing window one word at a time, at speeds ranging from 250 to 1000 words per minute. (The average reading speed is about 250 words per minute, though this varies dramatically across contexts and individuals).

She sees the problem as this:

One difficulty with the Spritz method is that the speed at which a word can be read depends on a great many factors other than the length of the word or whether it appears at the end of a sentence. The frequency of a word matters, as does its predictability in that particular context. The complexity of the syntactic structure in which it appears can also affect how quickly it can be processed.

The app is designed to limit eye movement, though Professor Sedivy says that

far from representing a wasteful activity, eye movements provide readers with a tremendously useful tool for language comprehension.

Now if they come with an app to increase my comprehension and retention, I'm ready to talk. Or at least read.

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