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Bayou Lights
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, November 20, 2003 - 09:49 pm: | 
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This was a sidebar article in the new publishers weekly. The bigger piece talked about whether or not the chicklit craze will last. Me thinks that at the end of the day the article speaks to the very American illness of "categories". Read on.
Does 'Black Chick Lit' Exist?
The proliferation of chick lit subgenres like "mom lit," "lad lit," "lady lit" and "Latina lit" seems to know no bounds, with one exception: books by and about African-American women are not usually included.
"There are black chick lit books, but they're not called that," said St. Martin's editor Monique Patterson. Though the two genres deal with female friendships and romantic relationships, "when it's African-American, it's a 'sisterfriend' novel," she said, adding, "white authors write chick lit. It's pretty much the same concept, but the characters talk differently."
"We don't use the words 'chick lit,' but we're going after a young, hip market," agreed Janet Hill, Doubleday v-p and executive editor, who launched the trade paperback Harlem Moon imprint in 2002, focusing on African-American fiction and nonfiction. The imprint's first title, SilkyDreamGirl by Cris Burks, deals with a woman coming to terms with her less-than-perfect life and relationships. It's a theme that recurs in Ritta McLaughlin's memoir, Every Friday Night: My Year of Dating Misadventures (July), which PW called "Terry McMillan meets Sex and the City. " These books are far from the first of their kind, noted Hill. "Waiting to Exhale wasn't called chick lit, but that's exactly what it was," she said of Terry McMillan's bestselling 1992 novel from Viking, which significantly predated Bridget Jones's Diary (1998).
Harlem Moon is trying to keep a foot in both markets. SilkyDreamGirl was included in a Borders chick lit promotion and simultaneously shelved in the chain's African-American section. The imprint distributes 25,000 copies of its giveaway newsletter, Black Ink, to African-American booksellers as well as major chains.
Others frankly aren't hankering to be seen as chick lit publishers. Karen Thomas, editorial director for Kensington's Dafina imprint, said, " 'Chick lit' is almost akin to 'mindless.' Whether there are African-American stories included in the category doesn't faze me."
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JMHO
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, November 20, 2003 - 11:17 pm: |
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Bayou, if they don't categorize then how will they market these books? It's also known as niche marketing. Sure we are obsessed with labels, but then if you don't then how will we distinguish one thing from another? Sometimes these "category" labels steer me to certain books and other times away from other books.
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Bayou Lights
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, November 21, 2003 - 01:15 am: |
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Categories in general are the problem especially when publishers/record companies/people try so hard to shove something into a box that the originality of the individual project is lost. That's what I mean if that makes any sense at all. This sorta speaks to the argument we had here a couple months back (and in print) about readers like/dislike of African American sections in bookstores. A lot of authors resented the classification (Percival Everett addressed the issue in "Erasure" and at a book signing) because they weren't equally represented in General Fiction, Mystery, Science Fiction, etc where they might be able to interest general browse readers. Basically, it speaks to a larger issue about the desire to compartmentalize on every level rather than get to the essence of a book/record/person.
It's late. Still recovering from the Santa Ana winds. Forgive me if I ramble.
Bayou |
JMHO
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, November 21, 2003 - 07:48 am: |
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Bayou, how about if the book sections in a store are divided into 2 categories, fiction and nonfiction? Or all books could be shelved into alphabetical order based on the author's last name. You're not rambling but at what level would you like the categories to cease. That's where complications start and when some books/music or even people cross those arbitrary "defined" lines.
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Chris Hayden
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, November 21, 2003 - 10:37 am: |
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Bayou:
I swear I had not seen this before I used it in the Love thread. I had been thinking about the genre of movie we call "chick picture" and made it up.
Maybe it was telepathy. |
yukio
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, November 21, 2003 - 12:48 pm: |
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Let me chime in this discussion:
There is an obvious problem with label, for who wants their work essentialized. Nevertheless, some work can be classified, hence the categories, fiction, non-fiction, mystery, humor, etc....yet, some of the sub-categories or sub-sub-categories are problematic. I don't think there is a "chick lit." section in book stores, but to place Frenzy, for example, in the African American literature is problematic. It is ridiculous, really!
Regarding "sistagirl" and "chick lit," i can't speak to.... However, if chick lit and sistagirl lit is formulaic, and is solely ahout how men treat women bad and how they either transform or need to transform then i say they are the same.
Regarding LOve: LOve doesn't at all fit this characterization. |
Chris Hayden
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, November 21, 2003 - 01:15 pm: |
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Love is Chick Lit just like to Have and to Have Not is an Adventure story, or "The Killers" is a gangster story. |
Cynique
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, November 21, 2003 - 01:57 pm: |
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The litimus test for chick-lit is whether the book in question appeals only to women. Did great numbers of men read "Waiting To Exhale"? Once the word got around that it was offensive to men, they avoided it because it was chick lit. But I don't think men will have a problem with "Love" because it doesn't cater to either sex and is,thus, not chick lit. |
Chris Hayden
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, November 21, 2003 - 02:36 pm: |
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Cynique:
Again, not taking away from the artistry of the book it will appeal mostly to women. There are lots of scenes with food, and parties and hair dressing--it is concerned a lot with relationships and emotional attachments--as a man I would have wanted to hear the story of Big Bill Cosey directly, get descriptions of the wheeling and dealing he did to keep the place open, his adventures, his successes and failures, not see it mostly through the eyes of the women who knew him--what did you think about Junior kind of falling for his portrait? |
yukio
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, November 21, 2003 - 02:59 pm: |
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Cynique and Chris Hayden:
Hmmmm....i believe that this "chick lit" thing is a valid category; i think some literature can have many element to it, so that it can be in several categories.
I don't believe in who it appeals to, because the masses can be quite simiplistic and provincial(though i agree, as Cynique/you say that it doesn't cater to either sex). Yet, in regards to most men and women, i believe that most men can not appreciate LOve, confusing who the narrative is about is with what the Story is about, there is a difference i think we can agree. I believe on the other hand that LOve attempts to use men and women, children, etc...community tranformation, etc....to tell us a larger story about a particular/specific narratives in a black commuity. COnsequently, whether we digest it, it is good for all of us, black and white, for patriachy is as much an issue for women as it is for men, black, white, or asian. Race is as much an issue for whites as it is for people of color! |
Cynique
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, November 21, 2003 - 03:26 pm: |
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I don't think there were any more scenes about hair dressing and cooking than there were about going fishing and a young man coming of age, experiencng his first sexual contact. I still maintain that "Love" is a book about flawed people, a subject geared toward any reader who would find the consequences of human frailities compelling.
Junior's falling for the portrait of Cosey was typical Morrison fare. Her characters always have one foot in the supernatural world. Junior was treacherous, full of yearning and insanity, and after a while, nothing she did surprised me. |
Cynique
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, November 21, 2003 - 03:45 pm: |
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Yes, Yukio, we do have to make certain distinctions. Just because a book appeals to women doesn't make it chick-lit. "Chick Lit" is a specific label for books that are for and about women. Yet, that doesn't mean that all women like chick lit. |
Yukio
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, November 21, 2003 - 04:02 pm: |
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Hmmmmm...L's voice was a spirit was it not?
I agree Cynique! LOve is about flawed people...this is certainly not "chick lit," rarely can literary fiction be limited to one category....but thats my opinion, CH. If thats how ya see it, so be it! |
Chris Hayden
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, November 22, 2003 - 11:12 am: |
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A male author would have written this story differently. He would have focused on different things. I was rolling my eyes to the cieling everytime she spent time on hairdressing and blending the different cremes and whatnot into the creases and parts--though I understand this was her way of showing how times changed and different settings--as women in different times and places groom their hair differently. I would have shown it differently--maybe talked about different baseball players--and I would have probably told the story from the POV of Cosey or maybe the ghost of his daddy, Dark.
Plus that I think she blew the handling of Romen--but she did as well as she could. She has never been a teen aged boy. |
Cynique
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, November 22, 2003 - 12:02 pm: |
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Chris, what you are not getting, is that Toni Morrison never gives a reader what he wants. She gives him what she thinks he needs. She doesn't write to coddle her readers or entertain them, she writes to challenge them, to stimulate their powers of comprehension. The fact that you had problems with the way she treated certain characters would not trouble her. Because all she wants you to do, is to think. (This is what she has said, in so many words, on several occasions.) |
yukio
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, November 24, 2003 - 04:30 am: |
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Chris H;
Explain how she "blew the handling of Romen." I'm not asking because i'm trying to harass you, but b/c i don't understand.
Also, the gender of the characters don't tell us what the story is about. The female characters were used to talk about patriarchy.
How do you know what a male character would do? you speak as if all men think alike and would focus on the same things. I think if a male author attempted to use the female characters as MOrrison did then he would used some of the same strategies. you don't focus on men because you're a male author, your focus is determined by your story. Again, if you were to read some of her other works, perhaps you could have a basis in which to compare LOVE.
I don't know, you so quick to make sometime either male or female. |
Chris Hayden
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, November 24, 2003 - 11:07 am: |
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Yukio:
I do not need to compare her other works. We are talking about this one. Compared to her other works, at least for me, this one is far superior because it is the first one I have been able to read cover to cover. Sorry.
Based on your criteria, you have no basis on which to decide that she blew the handling of Romen, do you-heh heh.
The efforts of the last 30 years to create some sort of Uni sex human have failed.They have been rejected even by those who were trying to do so--again, witness how femnists turned a blind eye to beastly behavior toward females by Bill Clinton and how they ran cowering to George Bush and his bunch of patriarchal co religionists to protect them from the terrorists. It is power that people are interested in, and they throw all the isms to the wind and seek to get next to it.
In our society,which a corporate military/industrial complex has come to dominate, those that can internalize its values will lead. How do you explain Margaret Thatcher?
Patriarchy does not explain everything that operates in our society--how can you explain our society without such things as race and economics, which modify it--if not kick it to the curb?
I know what a male character would do because I am a male--people are not the unique , totally separate beings that we all fancy them to be. I don't know if I can explain to you how she blew the handling of Romen--I did not get inside the head of a teenaged boy when I read what she did with him and having been a teenaged boy, which you have not, I can only tell you that I can't put my finger on any onet thing in particular he just didn't seem real.
I think partially it was because she isn't in touch with any of the youths today--she did better with Junior but she may know some Juniors--if she knows some Romens she doesn't really KNOW them--
Maybe I might have bought him had he been a college boy in his twenties.
I am quick to make sometime either male or female--maybe. But ain't that what it's about?
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Chris Hayden
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, November 24, 2003 - 11:13 am: |
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Cynique:
I know what Toni Morrison wants me to do with a story. I know what I want people to do with one of my stories.
Reality is that a reader will do what they want to do with a story. I might want a reader to admire the fine allegory I wrote--they might say, "Yeah, but I don't like what you did to Time Bomb on page three". That's the breaks.
By the way, what did you think about her having Bill Cosey whacking off out the window after he saw Heed?
That said, that is fine that Toni Morrison wants me to think.
She does make me think. I'm thinking about what I liked and disliked about Love--and the dismal performance of the St. Louis Rams, yesterday.
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Cynique
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, November 24, 2003 - 01:51 pm: |
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Chris:
You don't have to justify your criticism of "Love." I don't think Toni Morrison cares whether you see things her way, or that you be impressed with how she expresses herself. When you formulate an opinion, be it good or bad, she has succeeded in stimulating your mind.
As to what I thought about Bill Cosey "whacking off in the window" - to me, this act was in keeping with the scenario in which it appeared.
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Chris Hayden
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, November 24, 2003 - 02:08 pm: |
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Cynique:
I beg to differ about that Cosey in the window (and thank you for taking the leap on it).
Honestly this was the one part of the book that disturbed me. Not because it was so outre and dispicable, this is, after all a Morrison book--but because I didn't think it was properly set up.
OK, you might say his attention to the eleven year old girl might have been enough--but think about a time when this was set--the 30's or 40's? I don't think even Big Bill Cosey could have gotten away with this--but let's say he had. He wasn't drunk. He wasn't doped up. He wasn't a flasher. Why did he do this?
And why did Christine vomit? Why didn't she laugh or go tell somebody?
What did you think of Toni looking all ghetto fabulous on the back cover, flashing her bling bling? |
JMHO
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, November 24, 2003 - 02:47 pm: |
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Chris, Morrison has on a ring, a watch, a string of pearls and pearl earrings, and you think she's looking "ghetto fabulous"? Thank goodness she isn't permed or I am sure someone would be commenting on that. 
Someone made mention of disliking the cover, sorry I don't remember who, but compared to all those other book covers featuring those colorful cartoonish looking characters or those that feature Polariod pictures, by Black authors, I perfer this understated (or simple?) yet classic looking book cover.
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Chris Hayden
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, November 24, 2003 - 03:21 pm: |
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JMHO:
Re her photo on the backcover I was just yankin' folks' chains.
I was the one who didn't like the cover. I think it looked tacky like Nieman Marcus gift wrapping. It reminded me of the sort of cover you'd see on a Danielle Steele book--and this was not a Danielle Steele book. I thought a painting based on a scene from the book (or even the author's picture) would have been more apropos--and on subsequent printings maybe her publisher will consider it. |
Cynique
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, November 24, 2003 - 05:45 pm: |
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Chris:
There doesn't have to be a reason why Cosey did this. He did it because he wanted to. And maybe Christine vomited because she was sickened by her grandfather's behavior. Stop expecting Morrison's characters to be normal. They never are. They are always strange people. And you are naive if you think he couldn't have gotten away with this during the 30s and 40s. It was easier to do stuff like that in little small towns then than it is now. Men got away with a lot back in those days; incest, rape, adultery. Townsfolk just looked the other way. and, of course, women weren't as empowered then as they are now. |
Chris Hayden
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, November 24, 2003 - 06:52 pm: |
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Cynique:
Sure there has to be a reason why he did it. Where is the set up? Was he drunk? Was he an exhibitionist? Was he a perv? Though we might think he was for taking a child bride in those days in the South especially, it wasn't particularly odd-witness Jerry Lee Lewis' befuddlement at the outcry when he married his 13 year old cousin.
I tell you I think it was forced. the only thing close to it is the gangbang and the time Romen kisses Junior's hoof--hmmm. Is Morrison singling out those bad ole men?
What happened to ABM? He had some dynomite for us. |
Cynique
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, November 24, 2003 - 08:43 pm: |
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You're entitled to think what you want, Chris. And, in the process, be sure and think outside the box. Maybe Toni doesn't follow the pedantic rules of formulaic writing that require an author to "set things up." You have already suggested a number of possibilites as to why Cosey did what he did. Pick the reason you like best. I think Cosey just carried through on what began with him fondling Heed; he took things to the next level, deriving even more excitment from wrecklessly putting his arousal on display. |
yukio
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, November 24, 2003 - 10:11 pm: |
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Chris H:
I''m not sure if i asked if LOVE was superior to the others. Also, though we're talking about LOVE, a larger part of your commentary has been to the opinion that she didn't pull off a convincing characterization of a black male teenager b/c she doesn't know or have the experience of being a male( although she has raised, i believe, a son).
I'm not sure what criteria you're talking about.
I'm not sure how your uni-sex human has to do with LOVE. PLease explain the relationship.
I also, don't see the relationship between Margaret Thatcher, nor the corporate/military, etc...to LOve.
Indeed, patriarchy does not shape everything in this society, but in LOVE, two women's experiences within a patriarchial relations over several generations are the focus in this story. Class is central here, and race though it clearly shapes their experiences is in the background.
Of course men share similar experiences, which would give a man a particular undertanding of what it means to be a man. Of course. Yet, men, as women, have different experiences, family histories, age ranges, race, class, ethnicity, etc.. which influence how they respond to particular phenomena. In other words, you may know how men think, but you can not use your own experience as a teenager nor 100 teenagers that you interview to be representative of how or what a young man experinces in particular phenomena/situation(Indeed, if this was the case, what would be sp creative about poetry and fiction? In my opinion, it is about how authors take general and recognizable situations and make them unique, special, and different, so that though we have some understanding of the character's experience, we nevertheless must go for a different ride inorder to get where the author is taking us. On the other hand, we assume that we know this ride, then how can we really appreciate the author's narrative?).
ROmen was important not because she was a main character, but to balance out Bill Cosey's sexual malady. Consequently, it wasn't necessary to get into his head, for she only needed to "show" what he did in relationship to Junior(these are my rudimentary thoughts at least). I also thought her use of slang was dated. John Edgar Wideman's characterizations of basketball are amazing.
No. That isn't what it is all about, genderizing things. If you have a rigid understanding of what it means to be a women or a man, then (1) there is limited possibility for you to really appreciate an character who isn't representative of how you perceive a man or woman. Similarly, (2) these rigid categorizations of womanhood and manhood can often lead us to mischaracterize women and men who don't fit our neat representations of the sexes(this is also the case of most categories, such as race, class, etc,... This is why we often get into these "blacker than thou" debates. Similarly, we pidgeon hole class behavior, making all people in the ghetto to be violent, loud, uneducation, lazy, and all middle class people as representative, assidious, educated, etc...consider how, for example, Christine and Heed, ironically switch classes positions; we have the broke illiterate one as the matriach and the grand child of the patriach house keeping and cooking, etc....). BTW, we've been here before, so i don't want to bore you again. |
Anne Nonymous
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, November 25, 2003 - 02:17 pm: |
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Toni Morrison had 2 sons who she raised by herself so she does know something about how young boys act. |
Chris Hayden
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, November 25, 2003 - 03:22 pm: |
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Anne:
There are things that a young man will never let his mother know --we do not talk to our mothers especially, like daughters do. It is not MANLY, you know. Very few women know what it means to have to carry that--even as they insist we do it.
Do you have a son? |
Anne Nonymous
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, November 25, 2003 - 07:30 pm: |
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chris hayden, how would you have had Romen act differently? |
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