Why not cut out the middleman? I, for one, will begin voluntarily forwarding all my spam straight to Congress immediately.
Re Larry@6: Often seen on TV dinners...
Serving Suggestion
KEEP FROZEN
Aw, I was hoping for a semantic treatment of otherwise superfluous apostrophes. Otherwise, tons of fun!
As a Virginian and an American, nothing has made me happier than seeing Allen fold up. People here are taking his lack of enthusiasm for a recount as a sign that he wasn't truly interested in the Senate seat for its own sake, only in using it as a springboard for the '08 presidential election. I hope this sinks his national chances; I truly believe that as president, Allen would leave us all wishing for the good old days of Shrub.
Re P J Evans #39: The more history I read, the less I can distinguish between most governments and organized crime. I've come to believe that any sufficiently large crime family is forced to take on governmental functions as it grows. There are many parallels between the rises and falls of the major feudal ruling families in Europe and Japan and the histories of criminal organizations in the US.
Re #8: I fear the comparison between the Thomas hearings and Irvine's seminars is apt in more than just the way Randolph mentioned above; people may see through Irvine eventually, but decades later we'll still be stuck with the fallout from his techniques, just like we're still stuck with Thomas.
The killing aspect of astroturf is that it poisons the well of discourse. Before this, you could at least have a degree of confidence that the stupid was authentic stupid. I'm not sure if I can deal with sorting out the fake stupid.
Nothing to apologize for, coturnix. Thanks for the collection of links, and thanks to everyone here at Making Light too. Sources like these are needed.
Last night, I was at a bbq with a group of generally intelligent folks, most of them of no particular political persuasion and with little connection to the blogosphere. When the conversation turned to New Orleans, I was astounded to find out how little most of them knew about the situation and its history. It wasn't that they hadn't seen the news or read the papers, it was that the coverage they'd seen didn't have nearly the level of detail that's available in the blogs. It's good to have websites to send people to.
Lawrence Watt-Evans: So sure, he's got a novel in him. It just isn't one anyone else cares about. But it entertains him so much that its failure to sell and earn him a zillion dollars must be due to an Evile Conspiracy in the publishing industry.
And you can't convince him otherwise.
Aconite: Randolph Fritz: "To do a good painting, you must first do 200 bad paintings."
But you must do them in the process of trying to paint a good one, and there must be forward progress. Doing the same bad painting 200 times only makes you skillful at painting badly.
My thanks to both of you for clarifying the points I had hoped to make. On Lawrence's tip, the novel I read is all about the writer and holds nothing for any reader who doesn't know him (and if you do know him, you don't get anything you didn't already know out of reading it. Well, maybe some things you never wanted to know.) In his mind, the book is him, and he is good, therefore he knows that his book is Good. He knows this in the same unexamined way that he knows he walks on ground and breathes air. He doesn't seem to feel that there is a publishing conspiracy working against him though; I get the impression that he writes in part for the odd private pleasure of being a Kafkaesque unknown-in-his-lifetime genius, with every criticism and rejection slip feeding this self-image. And going from what Aconite wrote, he doesn't want his next book to speak more to his readers, but instead wants it to be even more purely himself than the last one. Yet he wants some audience to like his books and won't see any conflict between these goals. I suppose he just wants people to like him for being himself, which is entirely normal but doesn't make for good novels.
Sorry for running on. This is my first experience with seeing things from this point of view, and I'm still trying to piece it all together.
Hey all, long-time lurker and first-time poster here.
I just recently came to understand how Clare feels. I'm one of those folks who has a novel rooting around somewhere inside, so I have a lot of sympathy for first-time authors. This led me to tell a friend that I'd read, critique, and edit his first novel, which had already been rejected by several publishers. I suppose I had a romantic notion that reading something that no one else had ever read would be a wonderful and enlightening experience.
Enlightening, yes, wonderful, no. I let myself in for 600 themeless pages of characters unsympathetic and inconsistent as individuals and horrific in ensemble, set in a nonsensical world, with a plot composed entirely of holes that dies with a whimper about 200 pages before the end of the book, heavily salted with irrelevant info dumps, bad research, tortured language, and repellent personal philosophy. Never knew that one brain could hold so many neuroses or anatomize them in such excruciatingly dull detail. I've had to stop critiquing around the 100th page, because everything past that point is just interest compounding on the previous damage.
It initially pained me to be so discouraging, but it doesn't seem to discourage him at all. He's writing another one, and it seems to be the same book all over again from what little I've seen.
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