Goodreads and Silent Divas
21 October 2019 02:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeI discovered that someone had posted a 'rating' of Afterwards on
Goodreads -- which automatically creates an author entry for me there.
I tried the Is this you? Let us know link, but just got "Your application to the Goodreads Author Program has unfortunately not been successful. This is most likely because you haven’t supplied us with enough information to verify that you are the author.".
I supplied all the information requested, but presumably things like a link to my fanfiction.net page as "link to a publisher site" are not official enough to be acceptable... In any case, it looks as if I don't have the option of adding my other work, so it's a fairly moot point.
One offshoot of this was that I ended up importing my own pen-and-ink list of Books I have Read Since March into Goodreads, and as a result of having read/entered/rated over fifty books, I have apparently automatically become a 'librarian' with the ability to edit the data for existing books (or maybe just the ones I enter? I've already turned up one book from that list that didn't exist in the database, and was too old to have an ISBN!)
I've been working my way through "Slapstick Divas" by Steve Massa, which comes across as a weird fan-project: it's almost but not quite an encyclopædia. The author has basically set out to document every actress who ever appeared in silent comedy (plus a few performing animals, like Josephine the monkey from Keaton's "The Cameraman"), many of whom started out in one-reel slapstick comedies and went on to better things (like Mary Pickford or Carole Lombard), most of whom were never famous and have remained unknown ever since, many of whom ended their careers with the coming of sound, and a surprising number of whom committed suicide or divorced multiple husbands (some Hollywood stereotypes evidently hold true).
The first part of the six-hundred-page book consists of an attempt at themed articles, e.g. a whole chapter on Mabel Normand (hard not to mentally tie that in with the fictionalised version in "Mack & Mabel", one on comedy actresses of the 1910s, one on people who had their own starring series, or one on those who owned their own production companies. Obviously there is a good deal of overlap, and the author doesn't seem very clear on how to handle this; the book feels as if it's written by someone whose idea of cross-referencing is based on Web links, and who is clumsy and frustrated by the paper format. (Where you'd expect a brief (q.v.) or (see p135), there are awkward parentheses like "as all three had their own production companies they will be discussed with the other women who worked behind the scenes in Chapter Six" -- with no page reference to tell you where Ch6 is to be found!)
Unfortunately it does get a bit repetitive, which isn't helped by the reliance on clumsy and colloquial writing ("it seems like her career would have continued to develop in interesting ways if she hadn't walked away from it for marriage", "her sound appearances were not as successful, so she basically retired") using would-be-droll clichés (Universal Studios is constantly "the big 'U'", Vitagraph is "the big 'V'"); there are only so many ways that you can say that an actress was fat, or tall, or blonde, or died, or her career presumably fizzled out because there are no more pictures of hers on record. And most of the entries degenerate into yet another list of plot summaries or simply of co-stars -- the author has clearly done a massive amount of research, gleaning tiny newspaper mentions of obscure appearances, and then appears to have regurgitated the lot without the benefit of any editing whatsoever.
Another thing that makes me think there was no editor for this book, and indeed that gives it the air of being self-published, is the level of typos -- not outrageously common, but far more than the one or two per book that one might normally expect to find. One can understand possible problems with proof-reading foreign titles when Les mysteries de Paris proves, unsurprisingly, to be a typo for Les mystères de Paris, and Le bate au de leontine is Le bateau de Léontine, but there is also a frustrating tendency to greengrocer's apostrophes (we get Douglas Fairbank's and even Anita Loo's) in addition to the periodic ordinary slip. The author likes to introduce his frequent quoted passages by truncating the previous paragraph with a colon, whether or not the preceding sentence fragment contains a suitable verb or not. "The press reported:" is fine as an introduction to a newspaper clipping -- "she also returned to the screen:" and "not only did this plot give the star a chance to do a male impersonation, but also:" give the same effect as the fanfic author who hasn't mastered dialogue tags and writes "'She tossed her head, 'you are so small'".
And the text has a real problem with dangling participles. I think the most egregious example I came across was "Suffering from internal injuries, Victoria Forde took over the role in the picture, and Ms. Langley never returned", but they're everywhere. The use of "Ms" also grates, as do other anachronisms like describing praise such as "If there are any persons in your audience who do not like children, they'll LOVE them when they see Baby Marie Osborn[sic] and the funny little coon in the Pathé photoplay A Daughter of the West" as "jaw-dropping" and "hard to believe" -- the author isn't marvelling that a black child is being billed as an audience draw, he's manufacturing outrage. And since he produces an image of the original poster -- with "Sunshine Sammy", later a star in his own right, alongside "Baby Marie" Osborne -- we can see that in his outrage he has managed to mistranscribe her name into the bargain :-p
The second half of the book really is an encyclopædia; it's a couple of hundred pages of potted biographies of absolutely everybody the author could trace. Although the title is "Selected Biographies", so presumably there were people who were even more obscure than Arby Arly (birth date unknown, death unknown, "Rather plain leading lady whose only known work was supporting comic George Ovey in his 1922 series of lower-budgeted Folly Comedies") or Leota Bryan, who was the wife of one of Chaplin's comedy writers and appeared in some of his shorts in the year 1916 ("This seems to be the extent of her film career"). I'm not quite sure how one is supposed to read it -- and again, the cross-referencing is frustrating. "See Chapter Six" is unhelpful when there is no indication as to where in Ch6 the information may occur and the book gives chapter titles and not numbers in its running headers, so that you have to turn back 400 pages or so to the contents list just to find where that chapter starts.
There is certainly research material here for an interesting book, preferably one involving a specific body of work that the author has an informed opinion on; the most engaging parts of this book are those such as the section on Mabel Normand, where the facts are reasonably well known so that the minutiæ stand out as valuable extras, and where the material was available for viewing so that we get a comparison of her performances in different roles. It could also furnish material for a fictionalised composite novel about the life of a minor silent-comedy actress, drawing events from different biographies. And if you want to know everything that there is to be known about Christine Francis or Ora Carew, this is probably your only chance!
What the author hasn't really managed to do is to synthesise his research into an organic whole; there is too much information with too little of it telling a coherent story. An enormous amount of work has obviously gone into it, and at the beginning I was quite engrossed. But either the inherently repetitious nature of the subject material got to me, or the scale of the project got to the author and it tailed off. Maybe a suitable text for dipping into during a daily commute, or otherwise inhaled in small quantities?
Goodreads -- which automatically creates an author entry for me there.
I tried the Is this you? Let us know link, but just got "Your application to the Goodreads Author Program has unfortunately not been successful. This is most likely because you haven’t supplied us with enough information to verify that you are the author.".
I supplied all the information requested, but presumably things like a link to my fanfiction.net page as "link to a publisher site" are not official enough to be acceptable... In any case, it looks as if I don't have the option of adding my other work, so it's a fairly moot point.
One offshoot of this was that I ended up importing my own pen-and-ink list of Books I have Read Since March into Goodreads, and as a result of having read/entered/rated over fifty books, I have apparently automatically become a 'librarian' with the ability to edit the data for existing books (or maybe just the ones I enter? I've already turned up one book from that list that didn't exist in the database, and was too old to have an ISBN!)
I've been working my way through "Slapstick Divas" by Steve Massa, which comes across as a weird fan-project: it's almost but not quite an encyclopædia. The author has basically set out to document every actress who ever appeared in silent comedy (plus a few performing animals, like Josephine the monkey from Keaton's "The Cameraman"), many of whom started out in one-reel slapstick comedies and went on to better things (like Mary Pickford or Carole Lombard), most of whom were never famous and have remained unknown ever since, many of whom ended their careers with the coming of sound, and a surprising number of whom committed suicide or divorced multiple husbands (some Hollywood stereotypes evidently hold true).
The first part of the six-hundred-page book consists of an attempt at themed articles, e.g. a whole chapter on Mabel Normand (hard not to mentally tie that in with the fictionalised version in "Mack & Mabel", one on comedy actresses of the 1910s, one on people who had their own starring series, or one on those who owned their own production companies. Obviously there is a good deal of overlap, and the author doesn't seem very clear on how to handle this; the book feels as if it's written by someone whose idea of cross-referencing is based on Web links, and who is clumsy and frustrated by the paper format. (Where you'd expect a brief (q.v.) or (see p135), there are awkward parentheses like "as all three had their own production companies they will be discussed with the other women who worked behind the scenes in Chapter Six" -- with no page reference to tell you where Ch6 is to be found!)
Unfortunately it does get a bit repetitive, which isn't helped by the reliance on clumsy and colloquial writing ("it seems like her career would have continued to develop in interesting ways if she hadn't walked away from it for marriage", "her sound appearances were not as successful, so she basically retired") using would-be-droll clichés (Universal Studios is constantly "the big 'U'", Vitagraph is "the big 'V'"); there are only so many ways that you can say that an actress was fat, or tall, or blonde, or died, or her career presumably fizzled out because there are no more pictures of hers on record. And most of the entries degenerate into yet another list of plot summaries or simply of co-stars -- the author has clearly done a massive amount of research, gleaning tiny newspaper mentions of obscure appearances, and then appears to have regurgitated the lot without the benefit of any editing whatsoever.
Another thing that makes me think there was no editor for this book, and indeed that gives it the air of being self-published, is the level of typos -- not outrageously common, but far more than the one or two per book that one might normally expect to find. One can understand possible problems with proof-reading foreign titles when Les mysteries de Paris proves, unsurprisingly, to be a typo for Les mystères de Paris, and Le bate au de leontine is Le bateau de Léontine, but there is also a frustrating tendency to greengrocer's apostrophes (we get Douglas Fairbank's and even Anita Loo's) in addition to the periodic ordinary slip. The author likes to introduce his frequent quoted passages by truncating the previous paragraph with a colon, whether or not the preceding sentence fragment contains a suitable verb or not. "The press reported:" is fine as an introduction to a newspaper clipping -- "she also returned to the screen:" and "not only did this plot give the star a chance to do a male impersonation, but also:" give the same effect as the fanfic author who hasn't mastered dialogue tags and writes "'She tossed her head, 'you are so small'".
And the text has a real problem with dangling participles. I think the most egregious example I came across was "Suffering from internal injuries, Victoria Forde took over the role in the picture, and Ms. Langley never returned", but they're everywhere. The use of "Ms" also grates, as do other anachronisms like describing praise such as "If there are any persons in your audience who do not like children, they'll LOVE them when they see Baby Marie Osborn[sic] and the funny little coon in the Pathé photoplay A Daughter of the West" as "jaw-dropping" and "hard to believe" -- the author isn't marvelling that a black child is being billed as an audience draw, he's manufacturing outrage. And since he produces an image of the original poster -- with "Sunshine Sammy", later a star in his own right, alongside "Baby Marie" Osborne -- we can see that in his outrage he has managed to mistranscribe her name into the bargain :-p
The second half of the book really is an encyclopædia; it's a couple of hundred pages of potted biographies of absolutely everybody the author could trace. Although the title is "Selected Biographies", so presumably there were people who were even more obscure than Arby Arly (birth date unknown, death unknown, "Rather plain leading lady whose only known work was supporting comic George Ovey in his 1922 series of lower-budgeted Folly Comedies") or Leota Bryan, who was the wife of one of Chaplin's comedy writers and appeared in some of his shorts in the year 1916 ("This seems to be the extent of her film career"). I'm not quite sure how one is supposed to read it -- and again, the cross-referencing is frustrating. "See Chapter Six" is unhelpful when there is no indication as to where in Ch6 the information may occur and the book gives chapter titles and not numbers in its running headers, so that you have to turn back 400 pages or so to the contents list just to find where that chapter starts.
There is certainly research material here for an interesting book, preferably one involving a specific body of work that the author has an informed opinion on; the most engaging parts of this book are those such as the section on Mabel Normand, where the facts are reasonably well known so that the minutiæ stand out as valuable extras, and where the material was available for viewing so that we get a comparison of her performances in different roles. It could also furnish material for a fictionalised composite novel about the life of a minor silent-comedy actress, drawing events from different biographies. And if you want to know everything that there is to be known about Christine Francis or Ora Carew, this is probably your only chance!
What the author hasn't really managed to do is to synthesise his research into an organic whole; there is too much information with too little of it telling a coherent story. An enormous amount of work has obviously gone into it, and at the beginning I was quite engrossed. But either the inherently repetitious nature of the subject material got to me, or the scale of the project got to the author and it tailed off. Maybe a suitable text for dipping into during a daily commute, or otherwise inhaled in small quantities?
no subject
Date: 2019-10-23 12:23 am (UTC)That's quite a shame about the book. It sounds like fascinating material rendered dull by a lack of editing.
My favorite kind of nonfiction is the kind that makes me forget I'm reading nonfiction; creative nonfiction, I think it's called. Lists of facts bore me, even when they're about subjects I enjoy.
no subject
Date: 2019-10-26 04:14 pm (UTC)Not necessarily an unmingled blessing; someone else who went in for the same forum challenge found their entry appearing on Goodreads as well, only theirs had been rated 2 out of 5: "It was okay"...
(Goodreads uses a voting scale heavily skewed towards the positive end: 1=dislike, 2=all right I suppose, and 3–5 as varying degrees of liking. This isn't just a case of snowflake politics, it makes active sense. As I discovered when trying to do IMDb ratings, the lower half of a ten-point range tends to be fairly meaningless in practice; it's much harder to distinguish degrees of dislike than gradations in liking things. So what they've done is lumped all the 'dislikes' together as a single vote of disfavour, which is more or less what I ended up doing, and left the rest of a reduced range free for deciding on relative enthusiasms :-)
I'm currently reading William Dalrymple's "White Moguls", and I'm afraid the contrast is just too stark to ignore. He is a much finer prose stylist, and completely at home with the conventions of scholarly writing; he knows what to include in the main text, what to add as an aside in a footnote, and what should be banished to the realm of the (copious) end-note references. And he doesn't feel the need to keep pointing the reader backwards and forwards to different chapters after the fashion of hyperlinks.
He is presenting a vast volume of information, much of whichis probably unknown to his readers both in historical and linguistic terms, and managing to do so in a way that is as evocative and personally compelling as a fictionalised account. And he also manages to pull off the double shift of giving us not only the differences in perception between the period in question and our own, but the way that different generations in history regarded each other. I'm reminded of the writing in a similar monumental volume, Wade Davis's Into the Silence, which is high praise indeed.