---first topic: Bloomin' around
Bloom makes me crazy. I am a literary academic-- eventually one of those Ivory Tower types Bloom wants to tell what to do. But I also aspire to be traipsing those ivory halls giggling to myself about teaching classes about sci fi, magic realism (not just the stuffy kind) and maybe even King, right along with classes on, say, Whitman and Dickinson.
So while I agree, in theory, that it's good for a literary type (and by this I mean anyone who reads) to have some kind of common ground (oh, you mean, when they talk about Grey-Eyed Athena, or a "dark woods" there's some precedent there?) I also get mad because canons leave out so much. There's only so much time, and we can't read everything, but honestly, will it ruin us to not read about a big white whale as opposed to Sethe and Beloved or maybe even Friday & Shadow?
I hate LISTS that leave out so many great writers and pretend that they don't exist. Bloom BARELY sticks Toni Morrison on his list. He doesn't include many writers who make me laugh, cry, sell my soul for another one by the author.... all the things that I think make great literature. It's like he is one of those people who says "I don't read living authors" because MOST of the books/authors on his lists are DEAD WHITE MEN.
I don't mean we should all aspire to only read "GREAT LITERATURE" in all marble, gothic capital letters, either. When I say great, I mean it as a simple adjective, not a holy writ.
So while I agree that a canon can be a useful thing, I constantly want to expand that canon to include things that Bloom does not include. Bloom gets to keep telling people that society is going to hell in a handbasket because we're too worried about these issues like, oh, race, and class, and gender, and forget about "UNIVERSAL" truths but I get to disagree with him that his idea of universal and mine are the same.
So again, the point: I'm torn. Canon? Sure. Tiny 100 book canon that includes stuffy writers who make me fall asleep after reading four pages? Books I think "I really ought to read" and then can't get through? No. Harlold Bloom? Not invited to my dream dinner party. But then, I imagine he wouldn't want to come, because I would invite people whose work I love, like King, and Octavia Butler, and Sarah Orne Jewett, and Jaqueline Carey, and Twain, and Faulkner, and Shakespeare, and Gaiman, and Robin McKinley, Morrison, and Dickinson, and Woolf..... the list goes on and my dinner budget is high. Authors Bloom never includes on his "great books" lists would hobnob with the "GREAT" ones. And me, giggling like a madwoman in the corner. :)
---- second topic: Brilliant, King
And finally, I still like my description of King as sometimes brilliant. By this I mean brilliance in all its forms, including number 6:
bril·liant adj. 1. Full of light; shining. See Synonyms at bright. 2. Color. Relating to or being a hue that has a combination of high lightness and strong saturation. 3. Sharp and clear in tone. 4. Glorious; magnificent: the brilliant court life at Versailles. 5. Superb; wonderful: The soloist gave a brilliant performance. 6. Marked by unusual and impressive intellectual acuteness: a brilliant mind; a brilliant solution to the problem. See Synonyms at intelligent. n. A precious gem, especially a diamond, finely cut in any of various forms with numerous facets. –brilliant·ly adv. –brilliant·ness n.
Including: facets that make me think (the ones you don't really want to read but can't help looking at); including metaphorically "full of light". Including sharp and clear in tone-- sometimes, his voice is so sharp, and I feel I could walk down the street and meet his characters standing there.
I'm not arguing that brilliance is the same thing for everyone, but King definitely has those moments in some of his work-- like the Dark Tower series, and The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, and many of his short stories. But then there's stuff like Desperation (ack cough). SO, maybe one will feel better if I quibble a bit and say MOMENTS of brilliance.
Oh, and King's non-fiction book about writing, called On Writing, is quite good, and good advice, and also partly autobiographical. It's especially good, IMHO, on tape, because King reads it himself and he's a great reader.
I get really tired of the "if it's genre it's clearly junk" argument.
King has some stuff that's junk. And some that's brilliant. And you have to have read him to know the difference. Just like with say, Shakespeare, who has both, too. (Not to say Steven King=Shakespeare) but they both have been accused of being hacks and out to make money.
Some genre stuff IS junk (I've gotten some of it in the mail to review and couldn't get past the first page in a FREE BOOK with hours and hours to kill.) But what do you define as genre, really? Some of the best writing I've ever read fits into a category that one could define as genre, and some of the most boring, pedestrian, mind-numblingly obvious stuff has been "regular fiction." Pfffhtt. Good books are good books. I don't care what label gets attached. And if you haven't read it, you aren't allowed to critique it.
Ab_Normal said: "I wonder, do Doc Martens count as Liberal Democratic Jackboots?"
If not those, then you could probably get away with something from Birkenstock. :) Do they make boots? (Probably not, but still.)
Here's a fun one-- open your wallet, then take all the money out. Send it to me at the following address:
Ah. never mind. That one never works.
The other thing that I think applies here is this. If you're an editor, chances are you are a reader (and probably writer) who LOVES the stuff you're editing. And after a while, the piles and piles of unedited, terrible, identical to the last one you rejected junk (because SO MUCH of it is junk) are really, really disheartening, and depressing. I just can't stand to look at poetry sometimes because I have to read the stuff people send my website, which is straight out of the teen angst "oh why does the world not recognize my genius" department. But if I am too gentle in my rejection letter, sometimes the same author sends me MORE stuff, and it's JUST AS BAD. So the rejection letter has to be polite enough for them to not write back and tell me what a raging bitch I am, yet firm enough to let them know I really don't want any more of whatever it was they sent.
The standard "doesn't meet the editorial needs of the magazine" is a bit formulaic, but it really catches so much. Why doesn't it meet the needs? It sucks? It's about killing women violently yet pretending to be by a woman? It's porn you want to try to sneak past me on my nonporn site? Or maybe it's some other subject matter we don't publish.
And I guess one thing about this is that it isn't actually personal, in a way. I don't have anything against those people who tried and sent me something and just don't realize it's not so good. But in another way, it's personal in that I have a limited amount of time in my life to read and I wish all of them WERE geniuses-- it's personal to me, and I just don't have to time to figure out the perfect way to not hurt your feelings. ESPECIALLY when I read these rejection letters that were really nice, and they read "being a total bitch" into them. I just can't win, so why NOT use the standard form rejection? When you take the time to write a nice note, it just gives people all the more to obsess over.
I totally agree with Xopher on this one. If I lived near that town, I'm afraid I'd have to start up an "Undergound Railroad" with a huge bus and big signs saying "THIS WAY TO FREEDOM AND THE 21ST CENTURY". But then, I'd probably be the one to get arrested.
I like the idea of burning the place to the ground (and I've actually been through Waco, and know exactly what that means). But I'm not sure I would let the slave-trading bastards in charge out first.
I'm horrified that this is happening, and even more so that the legal authorities aren't doing anything about it, even though they clearly are aware of the problem.
Is there anything legally that concerned adults who aren't nearby can do? Yes, I see the link to where we can donate money, but are there letters that can be written or Oprah's to be notified?
Whew. it took a while to catch up on this one, too! I must make a point of re-visiting more often!
This is a bit of a thread hijack since people are talking about other stuff by now, so sorry!
Teresa asked: Just curious: what kind of "reasonable & moderate" is that? What are the rules there?
The particular moderator I'm thinking of will allow someone to post a little off topic, but will often move something that properly belongs in another "folder" to that folder, along with letting anyone interested know where the topic went. There are "characters" on the board like "Ranch Dressing"-- clearly an alias created by someone being silly, and often, long long conversations go on with Ranch dressing commenting on how it wants to, say, cover all the posters with gooey goodness. And it's funny, and we laugh, and we go about our conversation. The moderator realizes that in that particular section of the board, silly "characters" are part of what makes it fun for us. But the board has a special folder for "flame wars" that says "do it here and keep the rest of us out of it."
Since the board is located on Neil Gaiman's website sometimes people will pop in and spam the different folders with a question that clearly wants us to answer, say, a question for an essay they are writing in school, or something. We had a particularily rude one once call us all jerks for welcoming them. There really aren't a lot of rules, but mostly, we just try to be nice. The one thing I've seen as a "guideline" rather than rule is that we welcome people with "gifts" when they show up, try to get them into a conversation, and then hang out and chat with each other. It's a bit like a very large rotating party.
But the main rule is that you should post to the proper folder-- keep it on topic-- but when something falls out of line, the moderater quite reasonably moves it to the right place, and explains his reasoning. Then, when a rude person does show up, the moderator doesn't become rude in return, and actually allows for quite a lot of leeway.
Anyway, most of the board posters there are pretty capable of handling the infrequent jerk and encouraging them to be elsewhere. So that's what I meant by moderate-- he lands somewhere between "ban instantly and delete all record of said person existing, then spam other boards/forums where someone is talking about it" and "totally ignore problems till everyone who really wants to belong leaves and finds some other place to be."
:)
And I have to say, on a final note, that I'm insanely jealous that I never get long comment threads in my blog. I wish I got comments at all!! I realize I don't have a following like yours (intelligent and wonderful as everyone is.... ) but I wish I could! :)
I frequently post to the Neil Gaiman community, and there are sections there devoted to "off topic" non-Neil related posts. The moderator, who I would say is really reasonable & MODERATE moves topics around, and presumably has the power to ban someone (although I've never seen it happen.) But as far as we know, Neil himself doesn't frequent the board. If he were to come on and start calling us all snarky, we'd probably be a bit upset. BUT banning him after one post which was not really "off topic" would be really strange I think.
But then, if it's your forum, don't you have a right to control what exists on/in it? I don't mean Neil-- I don't think it's actually HIS forum-- he didn't start it, they just named it after him. It "belongs" to those who post and created it.
Everyone is making such strong, rhetorically charged arguments, and all I really wanted to say was, a la My Big Fat Greek Wedding:
"You're a vegetarian? That's okay. I make lamb."
Some people definitely don't get the vegetarian deal-- I do. I love some really well cooked tofu dishes. I definitely understand all the arguments about why to become a vegetarian. My best friend became a vegetarian not so much from ethics but because, as a nutritionist, she had some background in how meat is prepared (not in our kitchens, but in the meat-slaughter places) that grossed her out.
So. It's not so much about disliking vegetarians-- I don't, and I always, even if I don't know for sure one is coming to my party-- make a vegetarian entree (not just a side dish) just in case. It's about disliking what seems to be a radical nut group who themselves seem sort of hypocritical (it's not okay to eat meat but it is okay to traumatize people with crazy stunts-- we should ONLY feel empathy for one group). PETA is nuts. Vegetarians eat them for protein. There's definitely a difference. :)
One of my friends always says "have you ever heard a broccoli scream? they don't have legs to run away with, you know".
I think PETA might win more people over if they weren't so extreme; but then again, I know a lot of vegetarians who are that way cause some image of the meat processing industry freaked them out.
I remember being in Washington DC a few years ago and being really surprised to see a few women running around in full length furs. Here in Texas, we have TONS of leather wearers, but hardly ever see fur-- partly cause it just doesn't get that cold. So I thought people had just stopped wearing them cause of PETA.
Most folks, I think, object more to the cute fuzzy animals being killed than the ugly ones. I mean, fish aren't all that attractive, and there are a lot of "vegetarians" who eat tuna. But bunnies, they're cute.
I often wonder if PETA folks ever kill a bug. If a cockroach took up residence at PETA, would they give it a twinkie?
On the "customs/Canada crossing" comment-- I went to New York to give a speech about women writers-- including such radical anarchists as Virginia Woolf and Louisa May Alcott. I stayed in Canada (to see Niagara falls! duh!) and when I said I was there to give a speech (in New York, not Canada) the customs guy had a bit of a fit and gave me a third degree. At first, silly me, I thought he was just interested. Wow. I'm so clever that they want to know what my speech is on. Smug. But then I realized, after he asked me if I were handing out any pamphlets, that he was worried I was some sort of rabble-rouser.
So, the thing I take from these two fairly similar experiences is that if you have a job that involves anything remotely "different" just say you're a tourist. That oughta cover it. :) They must have had a memo about crazy people infiltrating through smarty-pants activities.
And I taught all my freshman writers one year about almanacs-- I really wish law enforcement would realize it's not the information and the reference that's dangerous. "Books don't kill people; people do."
OOH I totally hate getting into political discussions. Cause I have freaky can't pick a side opinions (I'm officially a libertarian, I think, and that just makes me WEIRD).
So I just hum quietly to myself and think of kittens. It might work when you get someone yelling "ditto" at you. Or whatever the folks on the left would yell. Either way. :) Just a little helpful advice from a political avoider and habitual enabler/pleaser type.
okay, anon that was laugh-out-loud funny. I do so love to wiggle my opposable thumbs at my cat and point out that if only she had them, she could rule the world.
mwah hahahahahahahahaaha ha
I would add, after a few minutes ago:
Cat: "I will not demand to be let up on my human's lap, sit there for a few seconds, fart very smellily, and then leave, while staring at said human as though SHE did it."
SHEEESH! It's almost as though my husband WEREN'T out of town!
I know. Smellily is not already a word. I have a poetic license, though, and am allowed to make up new ones.
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