Good morning, internet. Please excuse the fact that I have had no coffee yet, but I had to post this post haste: the amazing writers over at the amazing YA Highway gave me the opportunity to write a guest post about critical reviewing. The blog post, called “In Praise of Harsh Words went live this morning. I’m excited! And nervous! And other emotions that can only be expressed with the addendum of exclamation points!

Because I have a tendency to be long winded, there were a few bullet points that didn’t make the cut. Since they’re relevant, I figured I’d post them here (in no particular, and in particularly scattered, order):

• Peer reviewing is all over the place in other disciplines–and even other genres. If you’re a scientist, your work won’t even be published if it doesn’t pass muster with other scientists. In this case, your peers aren’t only your critics but also your publishers. Scary! But it’s understandable. Who can better speak to the quality of work in a discipline but those also working in a discipline? As for other genres, when I proofread reviews over at Strange Horizons, I always give the authors’ notes a once-over. These reviews, sometimes critical, always somehow qualified, are often written by other writers. “So-and-so has short fiction appearing in many magazines” or “So-and-so is working on a novel.” It’s incredibly common, but, for whatever reason (probably warm fuzziness), that same critical exchange doesn’t happen in YA–and I think that’s a bit of a shame.
• James Joyce is just one of many examples of writers who have been given near-immortality through criticism. I’ve seen people object even to quasi-academic analysis of YA works. This ignores the fact that academic critics are our friends. When scholars raise objections, perhaps, to its failures as a feminist text, or talk about what is, or isn’t Marxist about a book, they look at it exceedingly closely. They buy copies of it. They give it depth that may or may not have been present previously, and invite others to look at a work deeply, too. I keep thinking back to my Joyce & Cultural Studies class in graduate school, where the professor told us that the big issue at that moment in Joyce studies was the interpretation of a single metaphor in Ulysses. I think that we should all be as lucky as Joyce to have scholars so engaged in our work! And a century after writing it, too. Zombie Joyce, you know?
• Something along the lines of: “Critics aren’t our enemies, boy. You know who we should fear? Censors.” Poorly paraphrased. I first read a line something like that in Katie Waitman’s phenomenal The Merro Tree when I was about 15, and it’s stuck in my mind ever since. Don’t be scared of critics who want to talk about your book–be scared of the people who want to keep it off the shelves.
• With all that said, I know that some writers will always hate critics. I’ve seen it first-hand: Franz Wright has paid my blog a visit because of a mere mention of my former teacher, William Logan. Logan’s known as “the most hated man in American poetry” thanks to his reviews, and has received death threats. So there’s that. But I still think William is genuine about his opinions–his reviews are fair assessments of his tastes (even if mine are wildly different from his). For me, these risks feel worth it (though I’m not as big or as important as Logan, and I’m just starting out in my career so maybe I’m wrong so who the heck knows?) in exchange for being honest, for being fair and balanced in my reviews, for the sake of being able to talk as both a reader and a writer.

So there you go. Thanks again to the wonderful Kirsten Hubbard (who I “met” through reviews, donchaknow? See, they’re already good for something!) and all of the ladies over at YAHighway for the opportunity.

So Blogger announced that they’re no longer allowing FTP uploading of their blogs. My blog uses FTP. There are some options, still using blogger, but (from what I can tell–the information they’re giving seems overly technical and complicated) I’m not sure I like any of them.

This might be the impetus I need to migrate from phoebeeating.com to a more professional-sounding domain phoebenorth.com. Don’t get me wrong; I love phoebeeating–love the joke of it, the layout (though, after two years, I’m getting a bit tired of it; might be time for a change, anyway). But my real name is good, too. And I’ve been making gradual movements toward greater internet transparency. It seems like a good idea to at least grab the domain and put something there.

(Which I just did right . . . now. Something should be up there soon.)

I’m not sure how realistic it is to maintain two webpages and/or blogs. I’d miss phoebeeating, but knowing me, I probably won’t be able to keep both up-to-date. Then again, I don’t want to lose any readers. Gentle readers, any thoughts?

Tonaya Thompson, author of the Tin House blog post on genre, posts a rather fair follow-up:

And I don’t care if you have a story about Merlin in a space rodeo lassoing a pretty lady. If it’s good, you’re going to have to trust me that I’ll know it. Even if I don’t like it.

Well, good!

Unfortunately, their blog system is pretty borked. Tonaya says this: “I wish we could have had a civilized conversation about that on this blog, which was the whole point of my post. Instead I’m being quoted all over the blogosphere by people who are gravely disappointed in Tin House. Needless to say, this has me pretty shooken up.” So I went ahead and joined their closed-commenting system–which promptly threw my password into my spam box. Then I found it, and typed a response. This was around 9 p.m. last night. My comment’s been sitting in a moderation queue since.

It seems Tin House is new to the blog thing, but man, conversations are hard to have if your system makes it near-impossible to say anything!

I’ve been feeling torn about blogging (food or otherwise) lately. I think it can be a great way to keep track of one’s life, which is why I’ve been doing it, in one form or another, since the age of sixteen. I know when I Re-launched this blog I said I was going to keep this to food only posts. This was because I thought the “pictures of Phoebe, eating” concept was pretty funny and different. I still think that. But it’s resulted in a sort of feeling of fragmentation

I’ve been on livejournal since college, on two different accounts. I have some important friendships there, but the journal itself no longer feels like a representation of myself. Back when I was on diaryland, I poured my poetic energies into entries. The shift, first to livejournal, then to my sixcylinders account, represented a refocusing on those energies: poesy went into poems, general updates into blogs.

But the nature of livejournal, and one of its early draws–the friends’ locked entry–has become part of the problem; I primarily use livejournal to kvetch. This doesn’t feel productive in any way anymore, and I have plenty of real life friends with whom I can blow off steam. I’d rather not hide behind false fronts on the internet, would rather just say only the things I’m really, fully, comfortable in saying. I hadn’t realized how conflicted I felt about livejournal until I heard about the lay-offs last week. Though I’ve made a lot of good online friends there, and would be sad to lose them, my primary feeling was one of relief. Perhaps this is a sign that I’m out-growing the service. For awhile, the primary draw was communities, but lately that’s been totally superseded by metafilter, which represents, to me, the pinnacle of online communities. Livejournal just isn’t up to snuff.

I’m not sure what the solution is. I don’t feel fully ready to give up sixcylinders and the friends I’ve made there, but I don’t feel terrifically compelled to write there, either. Really, if I felt convinced that people would follow me here on an RSS feed, I would probably shift myself completely. Tonight, I read through my MFA friend Ian’s blog and I really liked how he was using it–as a sort of writer’s notebook, in addition as a place to hold general thoughts. Ideally, I think, that’s what phoebeeating would be, but with food pictures as well. Perhaps it’s just a matter of switching over and closing my eyes and hoping that the people I care about will follow.