Shakespeare and Me

by Holly West

I'm in Europe this week and I'm having fun looking for books written by my friends. Note: "Friend" in this case means someone I've met personally and chat with on at least a semi-regular basis.

So far I've found:

OUTSIDE THE LINES, edited by Souris Hong-Porretta

JEWISH NOIR, edited by Kenneth Wishnia

I've got not one, but four friends involved in this particular project. Kudos, Kenneth Wishnia, Travis Richardson, Gary Phillips and David Liss.

And finally, I found Lisa Brackmann's HOUR OF THE RAT at the iconic Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris.

That's it for me this week. Right now, I'm having so much fun I'm kind of feeling sorry for anyone's whose not in Paris.

Au Revoir!

Hap and Leonard: Nonchalantly Complicated

by Scott Adlerberg

I've never read Joe Lansdale, but I decided last week to give the first episode of Hap and Leonard a try.  I enjoyed it enough to stick with it, though the commercials Sundance loaded into the show were annoying.  In the era of Netflix and streaming, who can tolerate commercials any more?  Anyway, there was a small moment in the show that struck me and that, more than anything, persuaded me to give the series a chance.

Late at night after some drama he's gone through with his ex-wife Trudy and Howard, Trudy's current boyfriend, Hap goes out to a grocery store and picks up some beer.  This is deep in rural East Texas, of course.  He pulls over to the side of the rode, cracks open a beer, and starts to think about his childhood, a time one night he was in the passenger seat and his father was behind the wheel.  It's raining hard, and the two pass a black man who's pulled over on the other side of the road. That guy has his front hood up and is trying to fix something on his own car.  Hap's father laughs, saying something like, "Look at how wet that nigger is." Haha.  No special nastiness in the comment, just run of the mill racism, a joke at the expense of the proverbial other, and the boy Hap seems neither upset nor amused.  But a moment later, his father slows their vehicle down. There's a child in the backseat of that other car, his father says, and he starts to turn their vehicle around to give that black guy and his kid help.

That's the end of Hap's memory, and the episode continues from there.  It's a brief moment, handled in a matter of fact way, but it's the kind of quick and off-handed scene involving race you rarely get in American television.  Or in movies, for that matter.  Too often, if race is involved, we get a whole drama constructed around a racial issue or, within a drama, something made heated or one dimensional for emphasis.  Right now in movie theaters, the story of Jesse Owens and the 1936 Olympics is playing, and could they have given the film a more obvious title than Race?  Or, on TV, you get shows like ABC's American Crime. I watched that last year, all of Season 1.  It wasn't the worst show in the world (I haven't watched Season 2 this year), but it wears quickly because it errs on the side of didacticism. Hap and Leonard, by contrast, at least so far, takes precisely the opposite approach, and the scene with Hap remembering the night his father stopped to help a black guy, who he just called a nigger and laughed at, is exactly the kind of scene I love to see in a TV show or movie.  It's a small moment that without hitting you with a hammer captures a lot.  Lo and behold, things aren't so simple.  But the scene's very casualness comes as a little bomb to the viewer.  Since we know Hap's best friend in the world is a black man, and a gay black man at that, we can connect whatever dots we need to make the jump from that brief glimpse into Hap's past to Hap's present. Which is not to say we won't see more of Hap's past.  I expect we might.  But as I said, I haven't read the books so I don't know.

In any event, if Hap and Leonard continues to take this laid back approach to complexity, I'm gonna like it. 

#OscarsSoWhite and #BestNovelSoMale

Anyone who's been on social media in the past month has almost certainly at least tripped across a headline about the Oscar controversy.

What some may not have seen was subsequent comments criticizing the LAT Book Prize Mystery/Thriller nomination.

OK so here is why I am irritated by the all-male LAT Book Prize mystery/thriller shortlist:

-- it is the only one of the ten categories that does not include a woman.

-- it is entirely unrepresentative of the genre as it stands now, perhaps you listened to Morning Edition yesterday?

...

-- it is part of the larger systemic problem of men, for reasons that always strike me as baffling and incomprehensible, shying away from reading books by women, and valuing novels by men as somehow "worthier" when of course that is patently untrue.

I completely agree there's a problem if men are avoiding books by women because they think novels by men are somehow more worthy of focus. What I want to make clear from the start is just that this was what got me thinking about this topic and how it ties in with the possible return of Spinetingler awards. Nothing more. No fingers pointed at the source. No assertions the claim is wrong. Just my thoughts on the subject of awards and how this issue - which has been a recurring issue in crime fiction - is affecting my thinking right now.

I'm not here to dispute the opinion. I'll admit these types of issues always make me nervous. In my life the thing that I've been discriminated against is being a smart/nerd/bookish type of person. That's my childhood experience at school in a nutshell. 

There was gender stereotyping. I do recall being told that I couldn't take karate because it was a guy thing. I don't think that was born out of discrimination, but rather the gender stereotyping that was prevalent in the 70s.

What I don't like about feminism is that some feminists seem to push more for superiority than equality. 

And I don't want to assume that discrimination is the reason someone does or does not read or nominate a specific book.

I have to be honest. I tend to read books by men because I don't enjoy some attributes of women or interests that a lot of women share. I'm not a girly girl and have no interest in fashion. I've been married twice and that's the number of men I've slept with. Couldn't care less if you think that makes me a prude. What you do yourself is your business, but I'm just not interested in reading 50 Shades of anyone's sex life. I don't enjoy spending time with women who are petty, backbiting, superficial and fit the "mean girls" image, so I don't want to spend time with characters like that in my reading (unless it really fits the narrative). I just spent four years working with a lot of bitchy, catty, superficial, mean women. Yes, some people were nice and good and decent. Most weren't. It was like high school times 1000. I wake up every day thankful I don't have to deal with all that crap anymore. If I want to spend time with bitches I'll get female dogs.

That said, I'd hang with Molly Solverson any day. 

What have I read lately? The first Harry Potterˆnovel and Kass Morgan's The 100. Both books by female authors. One is enormously popular, and this is my first time reading Harry Potter because I tend to avoid the super-popular stuff, having never fit in with anything extremely popular in my life. 

I love The 100 TV show. It swings for the fences. They throw plot twist after plot twist at a breakneck speed and have done some things that are truly dark and haunting while trying to give hope to the human survivors establishing communities in a post-apocalyptic world. I liked the book but prefer the TV show, perhaps because I love Octavia in the show as opposed to the novel and I like some of the other characters the show has that the novel does not.

Although I tend to read a lot of books by male authors and count male authors amongst my favorites I do read books by women.

My reluctance to draw conclusions about the lack of female nominees is not because the inference about the reason is necessarily wrong. 

I just don't want to see the day that every award category has to have a token African American nominee and a token female nominee and a token LGBT nominee and a token Asian nominee...

I do want to believe that awards have something to do with merit, but the longer I've lived the more certain I am that they have more to do with popularity than anything else.

All of this brings me to the real point of this post today. We used to have Spinetingler awards. We haven't had them for the last few years. There are a number of reasons for this. The awards became too much for us to handle, and detracted from our ability to do much else. Combined with the demands of daily life there hasn't been much time in recent years for writing, never mind contributing meaningful content to Spinetingler or this blog or managing the awards.

We have been having discussions about bringing a streamlined version of the awards back. This may involve cash prizes for a few select categories. It could be very good for writers with works in those categories, and I like the idea of supporting writers.

The issue that I come back to is the issue of possible bias. I'm inclined to split any category in two and have a list of nominees and eventual winner in a 'best male' category and a list of nominees and eventual winner in a 'best female' category.

I really, really, really have no interest in investing my personal time and energy into doing something that is intended to help writers and find myself on the possible back end of accusations. I will flip my shit if someone comes at me and says a writer was picked just because they were male or female or black or pink with purple polkadots.

I mean, for short stories the best writers that come to mind include Patti Abbot and Sandra Seamans. How about Nikki Dolson, M.G. Tarquini, J.T. Ellison and Amra Pajalic? Spinetingler has proudly published all of these talented female writers, and many others. I still recall the atmosphere of J.T.'s chilling short story we published. These ladies are all capable of penning works that stay with you long after you've read them. Why, today I was just recommending Cornelia Read to someone...

The question on the table is whether it's time to split the categories. Will it solve more problems than it creates? Or is it a sign that one gender can't compete against the other? 

Thoughts? If we decide to bring the awards back we will be making an announcement soon so we're throwing the door open for discussion now.