Re Comments # 5 and 6: Okay, now that I've used the brain bleach....
Y'know, Jim, if you sold tickets to that, you could probably raise enough money to successfully lobby for impeachment.
Good Gods! Thank you for spreading this. I am a sock knitter, and have even taught sock making online. Sock knitters are deadly serious about yarn. I got started doing socks because I am on a fairly tight budget and like using the good stuff. I may not be able to afford the good yarn for a sweater or shawl, but the yarn for a pair of socks is definitely within my reach.
BTW, since I think we both live in Brooklyn, Teresa, when you are ready to succumb to the siren song of socks, let me know and I will be happy to teach you both socks and the greatness that is magic loop.
I was a college DJ in the 70's, too, and I have been having an absolute hell of a time getting them. But 45/54 for a collective score (Bruce, the folks here,me) ain't too shabby at all, at all. Nice going, so far, folks!
1) Chris Q: Not only the nachos, babe...pernil, escabeche, bistek empanizado, bistek palomilla, arroz con camarrones, etc.
2) Yeah, my city can kick the ass of the homogenous ones, because we are stronger for the variety of people we have! NOTE: I am typing this from an internet cafe, and the row I am in is me (NY Jewish), a Hispanic man, a black man, an Indian woman, and a Korean man. GO DIVERSITY!
3) I do not understand what these jackasses are so afraid of. What, they might be forced to learn about some culture other than their own? They might have to reexamine their stereotypes and prejudices? They might have to accept that the immigrant kids pay more attention in school than their Neanderthal brats do?
I work in an "inner city" school. Every day I see immigrants, both kids and parents, who are trying to survive in what to them is a completely foreign culture, much the way my great grandparents did when they came to America. And these kids work against tremendous odds. Why do those in our government forget that their when their own ancestors came here it might not have been leegally? Why do they refuse to extend the same courtesy to others? Is it, perhaps, because many of the emigres in this wave have "brown" or "yellow" skin? Is it because many of those in other parts of the country than the southwest may be of Muslim descent?
Thing is, I don't really give a damn why. Stupidity is stupidity. Besides, isn't it their own Bible that tells these folks that the only person who may cast the first stone is "he who is without sin"?
Grumble. My prior comment should have read, "I would take that one step further, and note that most folks who go to see Broadway musicals are, in essence, paying to see fanfic. Two examples: My Fair Lady is a retelling of Pygmalion; Fiddler on the Roof is an amalgam of Sholom Aleichem's Tevye stories.
From dotsomething:
"What *really* I don't understand is how a society that shells out money for movie remakes (King Kong, Poseidon, Ocean's 11) doesn't understand why fanfiction is all just part of the story reading/telling/absorbing process?"
I would take that one step further, and note that most folks who go to see Broadway musicals are, in essence, paying to see fanfic. Two examples: is a retelling of Pygmalion; Fiddler on the Roof is an amalgam of Sholom Aleichem's Tevye stories.
From OG:
"Lenora Rose:
What I always end up wondering is *why* they end up reading fanfic for something whose original they haven't sampled?
Someone recommends it and gushes over it. Or they come to a smallish multi-fandom archive for one set of stories and then explore that archive's other offerings. Or they're asked to beta."
Yes, and that can expand the fandoms one joins. I had been asked to beta a friend's Sentinel fanfic, and got so into what she was writing (she happens to be a very good writer) that I went and watched every episode of the series I could get my hands on from friends or the video stores in the area. And, I know I am not the only fan to whom this has happened.
"Fanfiction presents a special problem: trufans produce it, because they love the world-work so much, but at the same time they are multiplying the possible ways of understanding it."
Thank you, rhandir.
Geez, Teresa, this is especially scary given that I just finished reading Dreiser's An American Tragedy and realized, as I read Irving Howe's "Afterword", that the reason the book was so uncomfortable is that it really did describe how easily many people can have their values swayed and warped by the culture they are living in.
Thanks for giving me some more booklists to play with.
By the way, I will note that Frank Yerby was one of my favorite authors while I was in my teens, and I have heard of Mary Roberts Rinehart in passing.
And, yeah, books do come in, and go out of, style. And sometimes even books by the best known authors do. None of my contemporaries seems to have read Upton Sinclair's marvelous Lanny Budd series. And I fear that I am one of an increaingly shrinking number of people who actually know that Dumas continued his Musketeers saga until the day that D'Artagnan dies. (And, no, I will not say how. Spoilers stink.)
OTOH, I am running up against what you were talking about. Time recently published a list of "100 Top Novels from 1923 to the Present," and I have been working my way through that list. A lot of the books are mildly interesting, some are great and I an delighted to have now met them, and there are one or two -- Like Walker Percy's, The Moviegoer, which make me wonder how the list was compiled, and how that particular book won a National Book Award.
At any rate, thank you again for guiding me to the websites mentioned, since reading lists are one of my main forms of enjoyment.
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| 2007 | 3 |
| 2006 | 9 |
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