I sometimes abuse ampersands

Started listening to The Incestuous Courtship of the Antichrist's Bride by fleshflutter (read by Fay Jay). The fic is cracktastic, sure, but it hits my "but that's not what lit scholars do!!!" squick so hard! These are literally the first lines of the story: Jack Kerouac suffered a nervous breakdown and produced the manuscript known as 'The Paths of the Black Messiah'. Though opinion is divided as to whether 'The Paths of the Black Messiah' can in fact be recognized as a literary work and not simply the drug-induced ravings of someone suffering a mental illness, the text did achieve a limited print run in the 1970s [...] Many critics cite the extreme violence, bizarre nature and obscenity of the 'paths' as an argument for dismissing the manuscript as a literary work.

And later on, the characters cannot even obtain the damn book from Amazon. 0_____o <= a good rendition of my facial expression as I listened to it. (a) Pragmatically speaking, anything written by Kerouac, including his grocery lists, is statistically likely to be readily available everywhere, and academed to death and back. Not exactly the icon of obscurity, is all I'm saying! (b) More importantly, no scholar worth her salt would, in her official capacity, discount anything as unworthy based on its subject matter alone. Some works might be scowled upon, sure (say, Céline with his antisemitism), but not denied the lofty right to be called literature. (Oh come on, even my highly conservative undergraduate program featured a 200-page-long explicit rape-fest (aka experimental novel) penned by Robbe-Grillet.) And even the formal criteria are so subjective and muddled that value statements is just not what scholars trade in. Book reviewers? Sure. But it's the academia fleshflutter's supposedly referencing. If somebody tried to pull the "it's not literature, because literature has STANDARDZ" card after, say, the 1960s, they would probably be laughed out of the field (unless they were Harold Bloom. Harold Bloom gets a free pass for so many things any undergraduate would get rapped over the knuckles for!).

Otherwise, I'm not quite sure if the fic lives up to its reputation, but it's funny enough.

***

All She Wrote by Josh Lanyon (vol. 2 of the Holmes & Moriarity series, which has little to do with Doyle's oeuvre). I fully agree with this review, both in praise and in critique (except that the idealized love interest might be a genre convention rather than any individual shortcoming of this particular novel). I believe that this is one of the best books Lanyon has written so far, and he's definitely one of the best authors of m/m romance out there (well, romance/murder-mystery - two great tastes that taste great together). I seem to remember that the first novel in the series was distinctly sexist, and I'm happy to report that this one is faring better on that front. (Also, Lanyon is trying to somewhat alleviate the pervasive heteronormativity of all his romances: not quite there yet, and the characters still do not switch on-screen, but he seems to be genuinely working on it.)

This series is about the romance of two murder-mystery authors (one writes cozy Miss Marple-type things, the second - hard-boiled actiony things, and it is all relevant to characterization - how awesome is that?) who keep finding themselves in the midst of yet another murder investigation. Lanyon knows how to construct his cliff-hangers and make a reader keep turning pages, and the solution is not too predictable (well, unless you go by the good old "whoever has the best alibi-" rule, but it's cool that the characters themselves are aware of this convention). But, more than the plot, I liked the description of creative writing courses, this particular mix of desperate ambitions and vulnerability, all the ways things can go hilariously wrong. The conflicts between the protagonists seem more realistic than they are in most romance novels because, rather than being chalked up to tragic or comic misunderstandings, they are so steeped in this particular milieu. They are not pretty (low self-esteem-induced touchiness and petty popularity contest seldom are), but they are believable and heart-breaking.

***

Note to self: taking courses on trauma studies = reading at least one extremely depressing novel a week. Unless you seriously need to spend ~4 hours a week bawling your eyes out in the library, pondering the cruelty of humans, don't sign up for any of those, k? Love, me.