“This was what she disliked most about Gerald’s hobby; the contests made you think you needed something that, left to your own devices, you wouldn’t even want,” Evelyn, a woman devastated by the fact that her son, Teddy, has abandoned the family that Evelyn turned out to love more than he ever did, reflects of her retired husband’s passion for company-sponsored mail-in competitions. Her meditation while preparing lunch lays out the theme of J. Courtney Sullivan’s The Engagements, a tart critique of how DeBeers’ creation of the engagement ring trend, affects a number of couples across a 75-year period. But the way it’s delivered also gets at the core problem of Sullivan’s third novel: she seems so terrified that her arguments might get lost, that she doesn’t trust her characters, or a clever plot that unfolds like a meeting between a moral horror movie and a romance, to carry them. Reading The Engagements feels a lot like a socially-conscious response to having to scroll through entire Instagram and Facebook feeds full of rings that have, in some places, supplanted pictures of actual women themselves.

One section of the novel follows a fictionalized version of Mary Frances Gerety, the ad writer who worked on the DeBeers account, and who is responsible for the ad slogan “A Diamond Is Forever.” It’s obvious that Sullivan has done an enormous amount of research into Gerety’s life, but rather than creating vibrant scenes that bring us into Gerety’s work, we’re treated to passages that read more like school reports. Early in the novel, Sullivan writes that “Frances had just finished writing the newest De Beers copy, a honeymoon series with pictures of pretty places newlyweds might go— the rocky coast of Maine! Arizona! Paris! And something generic for people without much money, which she labeled By the river. In a way, that one was the most important of them all, since they were trying to appeal to the average Joe.” Frances is someone who tells us rather than shows us how excited she is to live alone, that she dresses like a man and drinks brown liquor like one because that’s what it takes to get ahead in the advertising agencies of the 1950s and 60s, and wonders aloud about getting old alone. But she’s so burdened with the responsibility to convey historical information about DeBeers, as well as to deliver the basics of a counterpoint to Mad Men that might have made a more interesting section if Sullivan was willing to write more naturalistically about her.

The other stories in The Engagements follow a series of couples from up and down the class spectrum, from James, a Cambridge EMT who’s become obsessed with upgrading his wife’s wedding ring even as a hole develops in their ceiling, to Kate, who’s guarding the rings for her cousin’s extremely expensive wedding to his fiancee. All of these couples have been affected by Frances’ work in ways that include, but aren’t limited to these feelings about their jewelry.
Read more

Over at the Daily Beast, Avi Zenilman and Ben Jacobs report that Avril Haines, President Obama’s nominee to be Central Intelligence Agency deputy director, had an interesting former profession: she used to run a bookstore. And specifically, they report, she used to–in addition to promoting the work of local authors and books out of smaller publishing houses–Haines used to host erotic fiction readings:

But 20 years ago, Haines opened and co-owned Adrian’s Book Café in the Baltimore waterfront neighborhood of Fells Point. She opened Adrian’s after dropping out of a graduate program in physics at Johns Hopkins University. The store featured regular “Erotica Nights.” including dinner and a series of readings by guests of published work or their own prose, according to a 1995 report in the Baltimore Sun; couples could attend for $30, while singles paid $17.

“Erotica has become more prevalent because people are trying to have sex without having sex. Others are trying to find new fantasies to make their monogamous relationships more satisfying,” Haines, then in her twenties, told the Sun. “What the erotic offers is spontaneity, twists and turns. And it affects everyone.” (She also told Baltimore Sun reporter Mary Corey that friends heckled “you just want a mass orgy in your bookstore, while she and her co-owner were initially worried only “dirty old men” would show up.)

“At an Agency recently rocked by revelations about then-Director David Petraeus’ secret erotic emails while having an affair with his biographer, Haines’ bookstore past seems considerably more appealing, and about as racy as what a reader might find in a Lewis Libby or Jim Webb novel,” the two reporters write. But I’d actually argue that the fact that Haines can get nominated at all given her past employment speaks to a certain maturity at the Central Intelligence Agency and the Obama administration.

Displaying interest in anything other than the most basic heterosexual sex acts has long been suspect when it comes to the world of government secrets. Simply being gay or lesbian meant you were out of the running for a federal security clearance for decades: the National Security Agency gave a clearance to its first non-closeted employee until 1980, and as of 1989, the Federal Bureau of Investigation was saying it had no plans to grant such clearances to gay and lesbian applicants, and while the Central Intelligence Agency didn’t have the same blanket policy of exclusion, the organization said that same year that it was confident it had never cleared a gay employee. It took until 1995 for President Clinton to issue an executive order saying the federal government wouldn’t discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation when it came to classified material. And it’s not just your own sexual behavior that could cause suspicion. Among the novels targeted by Sen. Joe McCarthy in his attempts to purge volumes from federal libraries overseas was From Here to Eternity, which acknowledges both infidelity and homosexuality. Consumption of pornography that’s considered “compulsive” can still potentially get you denied a security clearance for government work.
Read more

Justin Cronin’s The Passage, a post-apocalyptic vampire thriller with similar oral history elements to World War Z, was one of the phenomena of the summer of 2010, read by many, immediately optioned by Hollywood, and much-discussed as part of the larger vampire trend. But the sequel, The Twelve, which came out last fall, seemed to garner a quieter reception. Reading it over the weekend, I can see why: the number of characters and timelines makes Game of Thrones look like a Garfield cartoon, the mythology collapses into mystic psychobabble, and the novel eschews moral questions in favor of action sequences. But in one respect, The Twelve deepens questions raised in its predecessor. Buried in the rest of this brick of a novel are some startlingly beautiful meditations on the motivations for and consequences of sexual assault, and what the accusation that someone has committed violence towards a woman renders it permissible to do to that person.

The first of three main three main perspectives into this subject is Lawrence Grey, a sex offender whose molestation of young boys is an outgrowth of his own experience of a sex abuse survivor. He’s one of the felons who is tasked to do menial work in service of Project NOAH, the federal program to develop super-soldiers with vampire-like qualities, and when the Twelve, the experimental subjects of that program, stage their mass escape from the facility where they are being experimented on, Grey is one of their victims, and acquires some of their qualities. But after he’s abandoned by his fellows, he finds himself mistaken for someone else by Lila Kyle, a pregnant woman who has retreated into delusions in response to the post-apocalypse, and Grey is pulled into helping her. As terrible as their circumstances are, they give Grey a shot at being a decent person, even as he’s been transformed into someone who needs to drink blood to survive.

“It was a kind of love,” Grey reflects on Lila, and at the only woman he came close to having a normal romantic or sexual relationship with as a teenager, before his own trauma lead him to harm others. “Like Nora Chung, only a thousand times deeper, an energy that desired nothing, that took nothing; it wanted only to give itself away. It was true: Lila had come into his life for a purpose, to give him one last chance. And yet he had failed her.” It’s a tremendously poignant thought. There’s no question that Grey has damaged other people, that he is a criminal and deserved to be incarcerated. But his longing for a tremendously simple thing that’s been placed out of reach for him is enormously sad, even as we’re able to reckon with the hurt he did others before he was turned.
Read more

As the school year draws to a close, The Daily Beast published a list of recommendations from famous authors about which books no student should fail to read before graduating from college. There are a lot of terrific texts in the roundup, but its very existence got me thinking. It’s a cliche that education is a life-long affair. And it strikes me that the year after you graduate from college—especially if you’re living independently rather than moving back home—is a time of even bigger adjustment than your first year in college and away from home. You’re no longer thrown together with people from your peer group, which makes dating and making new friends more complicated, if you’re financially independent for the first time, you’re learning a whole host of things about what your money will get you, and what your economic priorities are, and you’re living through your first year without structured breaks to help you recharge and catch up. There’s no one guide to doing that complicated first year right, but these are five books that are all about things I wish I’d thought through during that time.

1. Shopgirl, Steve Martin: Martin’s novella about Mirabelle Buttersfield, a young woman who “moved from Vermont hoping to begin her life, and now she is stranged in the vast openness of LA,” is a lightening-quick read if you want to race through it, but it’s worth lingering over. An aspiring artist who ends up selling gloves at a luxury department store, Mirabelle begins the book believing that simply being in Los Angeles will propel her into the kind of life that she hopes for, and it seems to have arrived in the form of Ray Porter, a much older wealthy businessman who begins an affair with her. But as their relationship evolves and stagnates, Mirabelle comes to terms with how much work it takes to make real friends, to find a way into the field she actually wants to be in, and to demand that she be treated as worthy of investment and consideration. It’s a sobering story, but a hopeful one. And for people who are walking out into the unstructured wilderness of adult life, it’s an emotionally sensitive cautionary tale about the importance of caring for yourself, and what it takes to build a satisfying adult life.

2. Open City, Teju Cole: Julius, the main character in Cole’s novel, is older than a recent college graduate—he’s a psychiatric resident. But one thing the novel gets at is that as big as a city like New York—or really, any place you move after graduation—is, there will still be people you knew when you were younger there, and how you treated them has consequences. Especially if you had an unpleasant experience in college or high school, moving somewhere else can feel like a way to make a clean break. But there’s no such thing. If you actually want to move forward without baggage from your past, making amends will get you a lot further than trying to forget or ignore the harm or hurt you’ve done to other people.
Read more

Rachel Shukert has a fantastic post up at Jezebel about writing feminist science fiction, but I was particularly struck by her first point, that if you want to write feminist sci-fi, you might consider having your female character seek out adventure or a profession on her own terms, not simply step up in emergency circumstances, or face up to the extraordinary when she has no other choice. Shukert argues:

There’s nothing wrong with this; in fact, in most cases, it’s admirable. Somebody has to sacrifice for her family, her society, and the boy she loves who keeps her from going to college and impregnates herwith a vampire child that will probably eat its way through her stomach and kill her, but hey, that’s what it means to be a mother. (Actually, strike that last one.) But I wanted the girls in Starstruck to be different. They’re looking for adventure, they want to be the center of attention. They’re “leaning in,” to be really obnoxiously meme-y about it (I’m assuming that’s a word), making sacrifices and difficult decisions, but they aren’t doing it to satisfy anything but their own artistic ambition, their own need for recognition, their own big dreams. They’ve got a lot at stake—Gabby is the sole breadwinner for her family; if things don’t work out at Olympus, the fictional studio in the book, Margo and arguably Amanda will have nowhere to go—but nothing so much as their own dreams. These sisters doing it for themselves are doing it for themselves. And that’s fine.

Some of the heroines who have attracted the most intense followings, and made the biggest splashes in their adaptations from page to screen are those reluctant heroines, whether Bella Swan, who is pulled into a larger world of vampires and werewolves when Edward and Jacob fall in love with her, or Katniss Everdeen, who steps up to become a tribute when her sister Prim, who has little chance to survive the Arena, is chosen. But there are plenty of young women out there pursuing adventures on their own terms. These are five of my favorites who match Rachel’s descriptions.

1. June Costa, The Summer Prince: June, Alaya Dawn Johnson’s heroine, is an artist raised in the upper echelons of her society, Palmares Três, a futuristic and highly stratified city that still practices human sacrifice as part of its matriarchal governance structure. Initially, the selection of a new Summer King, a man who lives a luxurious life for a year, and in his death sanctifies the rule of the current queen, is just a stage for June and her friend Gil to stage another one of their public art projects. But when it turns out that Enki, the young man who’s chosen, has an artistic temperament himself, June finds a partner for her creative endeavors, and one who ends up encouraging her to question Palmares Três’ traditions.
Read more

Because I’m bad at vacation, over the long weekend, I finished Adam Hochschild’s To End All Wars, his history of World War I that focuses on people who resisted the conflict, through pacifist appeals to the solidarity of all working people, protests against conscription, or work towards the humane treatment of people who experienced shell shock or as-yet-unnamed Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder on the battlefield. It’s a striking book to read in the context of our current debates about everything from the Justice Department’s obtaining phone records for Associated Press, potentially to try to learn who provided information for a story about a terror plot, to the Obama administration’s use of drone strikes in targeted killing operations. There’s no question that the American War on Terror and World War I are significantly different conflicts, whether because the first is poorly defined by the borders between states while the latter saw states fall like dominoes through their complex alliance agreements, or because the former has been fought with volunteers, while the latter involved massive conscription. But in the midst of one conflict that’s been described as existential, it’s remarkable to look backwards at another one, and at the enormous compromises that Britain made, along with the ones we’re making today.

When World War I began, Hochschild explains that it did so in an environment where radical British movements were already highly mobilized around issues like workers’ rights and female suffrage, and that the war gave members of those movements opportunities to test their commitment to their own principles—or to move to the political mainstream. “[Women's Social and Political Union] suporters,” Hochschild wrote, “shrinking in number but ever more extreme, set on fire an orchid house at Kew Gardens, a London church, and a racecourse grandstand; blew up a deserted railway station; and smashed a jewel case at the Tower of London. They cut the telephone wires linking London and Glasgow, and slashed the words NO VOTES, NO GOLF! into golf course greens and then poured acid in the letters so grass would not grow.” But WSPU founder Emmeline Pankhurst calculated that the millions of men and pounds that were going into the war effort would matter more to the British government than the half-million pounds in damage radical suffrage actions cost in private property and repositioned herself as a militant supporter of World War I, while her daughter Sylvia continued prioritized economic solidarity and anti-war sentiment, leading to a split within the family. “Only a year earlier Emmeline Pankhurst had been in prison for inciting the blowing up of Lloyd George’s house, but now both were smiling as they appeared together before the cheering crowd,” Hochschild notes. “For months afterwards, newspapers celebrated the odd new couple. As one headline put it: ‘The Ablest Woman, the Ablest Man in England, Once They Were Enemies, War Has Made Them Friends.’”

The existence of those radical movements weren’t the only element at play in the British government’s treatment of war resisters, of course. The idea that conflict between Britain and Germany would be existential was stoked by popular culture:
Read more

As part of his Nerd Curious series, in which he goes back and explores artifacts of culture he missed in his youth, my friend and the AV Club’s television editor Todd VanDerWerff took a deep dive into Ray Bradbury’s short stories and emerges with what I think is one of the best summaries of what makes Bradbury’s work distinct, the element of nostalgia and emotional irrationality in decision-making, even in science fiction where we’re supposed to be enhanced–or at least, where rationality is supposed to rule:

In The Martian Chronicles, as happens so often in Bradbury’s work, people don’t look at the destruction of their world and run as far as they can from the mushroom clouds or the astronauts bearing chicken pox. Instead, they run toward them, trying in vain to preserve something that’s already gone. The Earthlings who have settled Mars decide to go back to Earth after nuclear war erupts there. That seems a very curious decision—wouldn’t those who had escaped such destruction by virtue of being so very far away count themselves lucky?—until it is situated in the context of Bradbury’s bibliography. The characters are haunted by memories of a past they can’t ever shake. In that context, their actions make perfect sense. They aren’t driven by practical sense; they’re driven by emotional sense, until both worlds are mostly dead and barren, a handful of survivors of two species straggling out a life on the margins.

You should really read the whole thing, which has too many big ideas to get into here. But I thought that was lovely and astute.

The trailer for the upcoming Civil War drama Copperhead conveniently doesn’t mention that the movement its titular characters were affiliated with wanted the Union to make a peace with the Confederacy that would allow for the preservation of slavery, and that it was naive enough to believe the Confederacy would come back to the Union on its own terms. But given the pop culture trope of the sympathetic or victimize Confederate, I’m not actually surprised that a Civil War setting is one of the few ways we could get a movie about people who have been dramatically marginalized in our political conversations and even in civil society: war resisters.

Right now, I’m reading Adam Hochschild’s To End All Wars, his terrific history of resistance to World War I. One of the things that’s striking about the book, particularly the section on the suffrage movement, is the reminders it offers that the things we do to people who have been designated enemies of the state now, Western countries did to their own citizens a century ago. Horrified by the forced feedings of hunger strikers at Guantanamo? The British government force-fed suffragettes, many of who it imprisoned for extended periods of time for civil disobedience. Angered by the treatment of people who oppose war as if they’re mentally ill or radical? Bertrand Russell lost his job at Trinity College for his pacifism and served time in jail under the Defence of the Realm Act, which among other things, forbid people from publishing writing that could cause alarm or “disaffection” among the British populace, and pacifist socialist Jean Jaurès was assassinated by a nationalist in France.

We’ve become very comfortable lionizing the risks soldiers take on the battlefield, in part because those celebrations feel like a way of paying back people who are willing to experience extreme danger and the trauma of killing other people on our behalf. But we’re still reluctant, apparently, to treat people who try and fail to keep us out of wars, or as was the case with many World War I activists, to point out the disparate impact of conscription along class lines, as if they’re reasonable, much less admirable. I’m not an absolute pacifist myself, but I do think that the courage to stand up against some conflicts is admirable, and the amount of it required is more considerable than we generally acknowledge, given the risk that you’ll be labeled treasonous or mentally ill. I just wish that instead of Copperhead, we were getting a biopic about Charlotte Despard, a wealthy British woman (and sister to British war leader John French) whose pacifism grew out of a range of social concerns, including her work on poverty and her suffragist activism–in other words, a movie that can put war resistance in its social context, rather than one that in its advertising is hiding the uncomfortable truth of the Copperheads’ acceptance of slavery.

In his writing here about the dearth of openly gay players on the active rosters of professional sports teams, Travis Waldron’s discussed a range of issues that have factored into the perception that athletics are a largely heterosexual pursuit. There’s the theory that the locker room is an unfriendly environment that’s been partially dispelled by straight allies like Chris Kluwe and Brendon Ayanbadejo. The persistent use of homophobic insults by fans suggests that the problem might be more in the stands than in players-only areas. And there’s the question of how being publicly out of the closet might affect a player’s negotiating power or sponsorship deals.

But this week’s given us a different kind of story about homophobia in sports, that of Giants reliever Jeremy Affeldt. Raised in a conservative environment, playing professional baseball sent Affeldt to cities where he met actual gay people, and gave him experiences that broadened his horizons. In Cincinnati, a gay Starbucks employee welcomed Affeldt’s son. And as he came to know San Francisco, Affeldt also came to learn more about people who had previously frightened him so much that he literally hid from the public. As the AP reports:

The ex-military brat said Monday he was so uncomfortable in San Francisco that he would seclude himself. ”I didn’t leave my hotel room when we came to play the Giants or A’s. I didn’t want to go out or see anyone,” he said. ”There was a profession of being wrong. I’ve come to that from a deep angle. I’ll probably get a lot of flak from the church for it, but I believe I’m right.”…

”There’s a chapter in there of me coming to San Francisco and being hesitant because I had homophobia, and now I don’t,” he said. ”I see more San Francisco as a city of love and a city of passion and compassion. It’s unbelievable this city. To see that and to have my heart change as a city I didn’t ever want to come to, to a city that I’m so thankful I’m going to be part of for a long time, it talks about that. For me, it was an awesome deal.”

We normally think about sports in terms of their ability to give different kinds of people the opportunity to excel, and through that athletic success, to disprove stereotypes about, say, the masculinity of gay men, or the temperament of African-Americans. But sports also put us in the stands with people who are different from us, and take young men and women to places that they might never have been able to afford to go, or brave enough to go, on their own, and expose them to ideas and people they might otherwise have never encountered. Someone like Chris Kluwe might have come into the NFL a straight ally, but if Major League Baseball turned Affeldt into one, and specifically into someone who is publicly reconciling his Christian faith and his renunciation of homophobia, that speaks to the power of professional sports to change minds in a very different ways.

Much has been made of the fact that E.L. James’ Fifty Shades of Grey, the erotic novel about a wealthy industrialist into BDSM and the young college graduate who falls for him, started out as Twilight fan fiction, and became a phenomenon once James changed the names. But she was hardly the first writer to hone her chops in fan fiction: Cassandra Clare, who started out in various fandoms, had a young adult fiction hit with her Mortal Instruments series, which has now spawned a movie adaptation with a $60 million budget. The Star Wars Expanded Universe is a professionalized version of fan fiction, giving authors space, within specific guidelines, to build out new stories and characters within a preexisting world. And given how many people have spent so many hours laboring over their keyboards for so many years, maybe the really surprising thing is that someone hasn’t figured out a way to monetize their work without changing the names or making them invent new stories before.

That changed yesterday, when Amazon announced its Kindle Worlds program, which is cleverly set up to benefit both the creators of original content and the people who write original stories set in the worlds invented by those creators and makes use of their characters. Authors of fan fiction published and sold through the Kindle Worlds program will be paid a royalty rate of 35 percent for works longer than 10,000 words, and 20 percent for short stories between 5,000 and 10,000 words. It’s not quite clear what percentage or flat fee the original creators of that licensed content will receive. But Amazon suggests that most of the pieces sold through the program will be priced in between $.99 and $3.99, though I can see those figures getting higher if Amazon gets its hands on some of the popular, book-length projects that have circulated in various fandoms for years.

Works can get rejected from the program–Amazon’s reserving the right to kick out submissions that provide a “poor customer experience,” and the guidelines for the program say it won’t accept pornographic material, which constitutes a significant percentage of fan fiction, work that uses racial slurs, employs excessive violence, or relies on heavily profane speech. And perhaps the biggest constraint right now is what fictional universes it’s possible for writers to work in. Kindle Worlds debuted with the rights to some of the content from Warner Bros. Television Group’s Alloy Entertainment, a notorious content factory, including Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars, and The Vampire Diaries.

It makes sense that Kindle Worlds starts with content from Alloy, a publishing house with a highly-defined style where authors have been known to be assigned to projects cooked up because they seem likely to sell well, and to adapt well for film and television, as proved to be true for the three properties that are kicking off the Kindle Worlds universe. And while Amazon’s announcement of the program said that they’d be announcing many new licenses for fan fiction writers to work in, I would bet that it’ll be difficult for the program to get access to some of the properties that have inspired particularly lively fan fiction communities, like Harry Potter or the West Wing. It might make sense that Alloy’s authors, who are part of a profit-oriented program, don’t have much anxiety about other people playing in the universes that they built out. But authors who are more proprietary about their characters might be more twitchy about the prospect of other people getting paid to play in the worlds that they created. I can see someone like Charlaine Harris, who is ending her Southern Vampire series because she feels the universe is wrung out, and is under enormous and irrational pressure from fans to continue, wanting to definitively close off the world they created.

The question, then, will be whether standard author contracts make it easy for publishing houses to sign the works they publish over to Kindle Worlds, or whether this is a provision they’re going to have to negotiate as an addendum, and find standard language for in the future. And it’ll be interesting to see which authors decide they’re interested in participating and which hold out, in part as an indication of how proprietary authors feel about their creations. It could be very strange to see authors of original works get eclipsed by writers playing in the worlds other people have created as has, to a certain extent, been true with Fifty Shades of Grey.