The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Seth Ellis:

Delurking to offer my opinion on the heroes-with-dirty-hands thing. I share Greg London's pet peeve of Peter Pan endings, though possibly for a slightly different reason. My issue with this phenomenon is that the heroes act like they're killing people--they're in a situation in which they could hardly avoid it, even if only accidentally or in self-defense; if you stun somebody who's flying through the air on a broomstick, and they fall to earth, their chances of survival are not large. But within the story, circumstances just sort unfold around the heroes in such a way that they seem to have gotten away without blood on their hands. At the very least, Bad Guy deaths at the hands of Good Guys just go unmentioned.

This is, I think, a species of magical thinking, and in the context of this story it feels as convenient as the various ex-machina devices, which do tend to pop up from time to time. In general, I thought Book 7 was more or less satisfying, in a really long-winded way. But Rowling's occasional overreliance on narrative convention is worth mentioning.

Dan Layman-Kennedy - I wasn't impugning the tastes of anyone here, and I'm sure Tim wasn't either. I'm just always curious where this perception of snobbery comes from, since I, who am presumably the beneficiary of it, have no experience of it at all. As Tim pointed out, I'm much more familiar with people impugning my tastes. But I suppose that's just how it goes. (I just read nerdycellis's post, and to be fair, I should point out that I tend not to read art critics. In fact, I suspect that that attitude may be more prevalent in the "mainstream" press than in art magazines.)

But was Billington really calling for that kind of high-minded art at all? He dressed it up with a lot of stuff about "nothing to do with the theatre," but his real issue with the elephant was that it was noisy and inconvenient. I don't think a more challenging, high-minded performance artist would have made him feel any better.

The mild irony of the mentions in this thread of the "avant-garde" is that a carnivalesque performance intervening in daily street life is avant-garde, or at least it follows from a long line of avant-garde performances. The eruption of art into non-art spaces was the textbook definition of avant-garde at one time. The fact that this performance actually engaged people, and they enjoyed it, just makes it a particularly successful piece of avant-garde art. Billington isn't making himself look high-class by disapproving of it, he's just showing that he didn't get it.

Speaking of hoity-toity, your spam filter doesn't like my academic email address at all. Could it be because I teach at a...state school?

You don't know what art is. You don't understand art.

I'm an artist who makes strange stuff, and the interesting thing about hearing people say this is that this attitude is not in fact shared by most of the people who make art, even avant-gardey-style art. The time when most, or even any significant number, of "avant-garde" artists saw themselves as ahead or above of the rest of society is pretty much in the past (with a few unfortunate exceptions, of course). Most of the artists I know, which means most of the people I know, see themselves as part of a subculture, with the same relationship to the mainstream as any other subculture. Some people don't like it the same way some people don't like punk rock, or minimalist electronic music, or anything else.

Which makes it not really avant-garde, of course, in an accurate meaning of the word. Avant-gardism, in the sense of breaking down existing preconceptions of the nature of art, is something that can really only exist at particular historical moments, and this isn't one of them. What you have now is people making certain kinds of art because that's the kind of art they want to make; it gets called avant-garde out of habit more than anything. At least, this is true in the U.S., where this style of art is not government-funded to any significant extent (and never was, Mapplethorpe hysteria to the contrary).

Can CafePress do two-sided T-shirts? If they can, I'd suggest a big graphic on the front, stylized modern display font, anglo-saxon, and on the back, a Modern English translation in a more normal sans-serif. With flag, please.

Actually, what I really suggest is a design contest, but I suppose that could get out of hand.

James McDonald wins with a double whammy for World's Most Depressing Funny Joke.

A little late to the New York party, but a couple more suggestions: "New York Shuffle", Graham Parker and the Rumour; practically anything by Luna, particularly "Chinatown," "Great Jones Street," and for general mood, all of Penthouse.

Jeremy & Xopher - I remember, reading Snow Crash, thinking that Stephenson showed signs of having done research solely in one or two old-fashioned general-interest archaeology books. He actually mentions one by the late Samuel Kramer, who was famous for a book about "firsts" in ancient Sumer: The first civilization in the world! The first towns! The first agriculture! And, more relevantly to Snow Crash, the first writing!

Of course it would be more accurate to call cuneiform "the earliest known surviving example of writing that we've yet discovered from this region," but it's less exciting. Anyway, my impression was that Stephenson took the idea of "first" language and went with it, without looking into it very carefully. (Jeremy, it is a character who explains the idea, but the notion of a single evolutionary shift in human consciousness about 5000 years ago is what motivates the plot.) I don't know that I'd call it real racism so much as shallow research.

I also remember thinking that he could have gotten away with it as a story if he hadn't explained it so thoroughly, which just displayed the holes in his reasoning. The perils of the infodump.

I was made able to read Ulysses by reading the Borges essay in which he admits that not only has he never read Ulysses all the way through, he doesn't think it's possible, or at least desirable. It's one of the things he admired about the book. Being Borges, he got a lot of good stuff out of it about reading the book as wandering in a city, the nature of narrative and the character of the reader, and so forth. If it's okay by Borges, it's okay by me; so I read part of it.

Elsewhere, Borges said he couldn't imagine a reader of Finnegan's Wake in the same way that he couldn't imagine the fourth dimension; he understood it was theoretically possible, but he couldn't conceive of what such a thing might be like.

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