(via leoncrawl)
I got bogged down in too much liquor and too much hearty male wantonness early on in “The Brown Coast.”
Liquor and wantonness are hardly male-specific. We need a new vocabulary for describing our reactions to text that do not rely upon outdated modes of gender. Also, I really love the book and Gumport’s review… so, bias admitted.
Hey, I loved the review and am hopefully anticipating loving the book on a second try. Maybe I just wasn’t feeling like fiction on the bus that day.
On the other point: I agree about needing new vocabularies of gender — we always need new vocabularies of gender — but the point (from the review) stands that there is a sort of uber-masculine cock culture seeping into the reception of a lot of popular new fiction. I don’t have a problem with cock culture, necessarily, but the weird idea that stories about men who can kill their dinner are somehow better or truer than stories about men who buy their dinner from Taco Bell seems to have started circulating, which I think is pretty unfortunate, since men who can kill their dinner don’t inherently make for better fiction.
