Didactic romance novels

Romance novels make up the largest portion of the American book market (source). They're incredibly popular, but no one can argue that they're great literature. They tend to be 150 pages of escapism and wishful thinking, not to mention the implausible plots. Nevertheless, a large group of women read an awful lot of these books.

Can we get women to improve themselves by reading romance novels? Is it possible to use the common elements of these books (international travel, sex, relationships, and so on) to expand the horizons of their readers? For example, can we use a story with a jet setting heroine to teach world geography? Could there be some slightly more in depth (and accurate) details about the creative careers so popular in the genre? Can we use the constant chatter about relationships to teach basic elements of psychological theory? In short, is there a way to sneak a little extra education and knowledge into the fluff of romance novels?

Different kinds of story arcs

Books are different from TV. We know this. The difference I'm thinking of today is in the way their story arcs work. In books (the ones that aren't part of a series, I mean), there's a little bit of a problem. Maybe not everyone has this problem, but I do. I constantly find myself wanting to hurry up and finish the book, just so that I can see how the story ends. But when I finish it, I realize that it's all over. There is no more. Not only is the story over, but the characters and setting are all gone, too. And then I get sad.

This is an area where TV wins. Or where TV series win, at least. The joy of a good TV series is that the viewer gets a satisfying story arc every week, but with the added bonus of not losing everything else at the end of a given story. The characters and setting stick around for another arc next week, with the added bonus of a little more backstory than before.

This quality can make TV, as well as series novels, very attractive. It makes for strong relationships between viewers and characters (I say between, but it's quite one sided) while providing lots of satisfying conclusions to stories.

Books for walls

For several months, my living room has looked like a disaster, thanks to a particularly nasty shade of red on the walls. I'm not keen on painting a small room in a colour dark enough to cover the red. That means that my only real option is wallpaper. But wallpaper is expensive. Solution? Cover the walls in the pages of cheap, second hand teeny bopper romance novels. Six books (that's roughly 1200 pages) and 2L of podge later, two out of four walls are done. Once all four walls are done, up go the shelves and on with the books that are more for reading than tearing apart.

Labour of Love

I've been noticing lately (or always, take your pick) that love and romantic interpersonal relationships are a pretty frequent topic of discussion among people. Whether it's a discussion about loving and losing, or a horror story of spectacularly garbled communication, or the standard junk you find in every woman oriented magazine in existence, the concept of romantic love is everywhere. This is cool, because it happens to be a fun topic to discuss.

Because romantic love is interesting to talk about, and because I've been needing a nice, entertaining project to add to my already full plate, I've decided to start (another!) new zine. I'm calling it Labour of Love, and it truly is going to be one. It's going to be my prettiest zine yet, and I'm even going to try to publish it on a semi-regular basis. Basically, because everyone likes to talk about it, I'd like to add a little deeper thinking to the topic of love, in an entertaining and well packaged zine.

If anyone other than search engine spiders are reading this, I'm totally welcoming suggestions on this one.

The Vernacular Woman

Finally finished a little site that I've been working on for a couple of months. Why did a small site take a couple months? Because I was trying to take a complicated idea that's also been done to death and make it new and simple. The result is a video with a little scene by scene didactic track down below. It's kind of like those audio picture books that little kids have.
Link

Instead of shooting shotguns at cans...

Here's a new idea for a fun passtime: Throw romance novels at Barbie dolls. It's like bowling or those carnival games with the water guns, only way more fun. Seriously, you can get a good throw with romance novels. I've tried it. They have a nice heft, but they aren't sturdy enough to actually damage things. And it's amazing catharsis.

Am I allowed to resent couples?

I remember reading, in one of the books about romance novels that I've been going through for my Legally Blonde/romance novel analysis paper, a passage from an old-ish romance novel. Some supposedly wiser, and certainly older, woman was advising the young heroine. She was talking about how women in love are happier to see other couples. I believe the term she used was “more generous.” She was essentially saying that women are more complete, more selfless, and more understanding of others as long as they're in (reciprocal) love. And in this case, it's worth pointing out that love denotes coupledom. I caught myself wondering about that idea today.

I was on my way home from the store, the weather was fantastic (for February in Montreal, at least) and I felt great. I turned onto a side street and was immediately confronted by the sight of a couple kissing as they walked. My instinct was to resent, if not them, then at least their public display of affection. My second reaction was to wonder why I was resenting them and their display. Am I allowed to be displeased by people who kiss in public? Am I merely resenting them because they are displaying their status as a unit? Does the wisdom from the romance novel apply? Would I stop resenting their display if I were part of a unit?

In short, is it valid to resent public displays of affection?

On being ordinary and the economy

Digging deeper into the existing research on romance novels and gender, I've discovered an interesting tendency. I find it interesting, although it shouldn't surprise me. I'm finding more and more evidence that most people just want to have an ordinary life. There seems to be an overwhelming desire to have a comfortable life and just pass the time. I shouldn't be surprised because that's essentially what gets classified as the American Dream: the house, the husband, the car, the kids.

I'm surprised, of course, because I lack the fundamental ability to get out of my own head. My (heavily flawed) reasoning is that if I aspire to be extraordinary and to make an impact on the world, then most people should aspire to be extraordinary and to make an impact on the world. Wrong. If I actually take a moment to think about it, it's easy to see that I've made a seriously bad assumption.

Where does the economy come into it, you may rightly ask. The glib answer would be: where doesn't the economy come into it? But that's not very productive. It is in the interest of industry to have customers who want to buy things. A shiny new car every few years? That's fantastic news for the economy. Taking the metro or walking? Not so much. Cosmetics? Exfoliants? Cleansing pads? New clothes every season? Super! All of these things are sold to us as ways to fit in, to be normal, to live the life. That's not by chance, either.

Being extraordinary? If extraordinary means, etymologically, to be "out of order" (see for yourself), that's not so conducive to meeting societal norms. Want to save the environment? Not good economic sense. Want to re-examine gender roles? Downright dangerous. Not meeting norms? Not good for the economy.

on our contemporary definition of love

I've been researching a paper that I'm doing for my film studies class. I'm thinking about Legally Blonde, the general category of movies aimed at young women, romance novels, and how all of those media influence gender construction. It's interesting stuff, but puzzling. The problem is that all of this research is making me constantly have to run up against the concept of romantic love. And that's something that I have trouble processing, even outside of the academic context.

Think about it: we have this massive collection of expectations. We expect the undefinable spark that we call love. We expect someone compatible enough to be a very good friend. We expect to find someone who can do those two thing, and then we expect them to stay and make a life as a unit. That alone is an awful lot to expect.

There's more, though. At this point in time, we expect the compatibility, the spark, the life, and a whole other set of things. We expect an environment of mutual respect, which is a fairly new condition. We expect to find our partners interesting. We expect them to fit into our existing lifestyle. We expect all of these things, but we don't seem, as a society, to have a very good track record when it comes to holding it all together.

Even if it doesn't work out a lot of the time, we're fiercely tied to our happily ever after definition of love. From fairy tales, on through happy-ending-girly movies, up to chick lit and series romances, the stories women get told are jammed full of perfect, considerate, attractive, nice men who want to make breakfast in bed and then grow old together

When I think it through, I wonder how much of that ideal is really necessary. And then, because I'm a product of my culture, I kick myself for even imagining settling for less.