I don’t mean to be unkind, but I don’t get how you can claim to “love books” and have a shelf full of Harry Potter and Jodi Picault. Have we created a nation of people who honestly believe that “reading” is one of their hobbies because they own a copy of The DaVinci Code? Where did we go wrong?
Your homework: Burn your books. All of them. If you think they’re good books, then burn everything else you have that you think is good. Don’t give them away, or donate them – that’s just moving the problem on to some other poor bastard.
Now populate your shelves with: William Faulkner; Vladimir Nabokov; Ernest Hemingway; Hunter S. Thompson; Kurt Vonnegut; Nikolai Gogol; Fyodor Dostoevsky; Frank Kafka; and that’s just for starters.
Come back to me for further recommendations when the fog has lifted from your brain.
I’d forgotten about this lovely reply to one of my photos from 7 years ago. Oh, literary snobbery, you haven’t changed much.
I’d forgotten about it too. I hope you’ve developed a love of literature in the last 7 years, or at least burned your copy of The DaVinci Code.
And what have we learned?
Never confuse “snobbery” or “elitism” for having standards. (If you don’t have any standards for yourself, then why should anyone else?)
Never confuse “popular” with “good”. (If every book on your bookshelf appeared on a best-seller list, how do you tell the difference?)
Learn to accept criticism, especially from people who have no investment in whether you take their advice or not. (If you find it difficult to accept criticism, you’re missing out on many opportunities to improve. Here are my book reviews. I might have got it all wrong. Please feel free to reblog any of them with any criticism you may have – let’s get a conversation going! I’ve also started a blog of simplified classics called Pretend You’ve Read. Please feel free to criticise anything you feel I got wrong there, too. Why not? Hone your reader’s instincts.)
Keep pushing forward. (Otherwise, what are you doing with your life?)
Always try to be a better version of yourself. (ditto)
Put your energy into creating things, making things and helping people, not into destroying things, taking things apart or trashing people. (I made that post with the sole intention of improving your life. I wasn’t try to upset you or make you feel bad or come across as “snobbery”. I was trying to help you understand what literature is, what it can do, and how you can cut yourself off a slice of that crazy action.)
A great way to learn to be a better version of yourself is to read literature. (I assume you understand this better than you did seven years ago. At least, I hope so!)
All from that one little post I reblogged from you 7 years ago.
Let’s be friends!
Well actually, my career in publishing and the book industry – which I hadn’t yet begun when I posted this – is down to my passion for all books, whether they’re deemed to be “literature” or not. The book industry is not sustained by holding onto the novels of dead white men, but by recognising that there are gems in all genres, and valuing all readers.
I personally love children’s books and YA. But I also ran a successful Classic Challenge for five years. (Don’t think that was anything to do with you, dear reader).
I have not moved on from Harry Potter or A Series of Unfortunate Events (maybe Dan Brown, but hey, it was seven years ago) and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” – Haruki Murakami
William Faulkner; Vladimir Nabokov; Ernest Hemingway; Hunter S.
Thompson; Kurt Vonnegut; Nikolai Gogol; Fyodor Dostoevsky; Frank Kafka.
Wow. White guys. So many white guys. They are the one true coming of all literature.
Wow. This guy. Telling OP that all her interests are trash and that she should burn them so she could learn about real literature. Then, seven years later, telling her he was doing it to improve her life.
This whole set of interactions is so new and different. It’s almost like it hasn’t happened a billion times in the last day. Wow.
Good grief. What a tool.
Don’t you know all good arguments start with “burn that book”?
Frank Kafka.
Frank.
The day someone tells me to burn books of any kind is the day I know that they are a moron who believes in censorship of individual taste and of FUN. The day that person only recommends books that are on any school syllabus and doesn’t branch out beyond them underscores the point with fifteen exclamation marks.
Probably my favorite is the fact that OP had 2 obvious Richard Dawkins books (The Selfish Gene and The Greatest Show on Earth) indicating a wide and well-nourished range of interests – from evolutionary biology to young adult fantasy to women’s fiction. (and how satisfying and beautiful is her bookshelf!!) I mean, the cure for a balanced literary diet is not “apply a small wodge of tedious historical men’s fiction following the same themes.”
Meanwhile, her self-appointed critic literally just has a list of dead white American/Russian men who wrote Gritty Literary Fiction About Sad Stuff during a narrow period of history. THEY’RE NOT EVEN THE PRETENTIOUS CLASSICS! THEY’RE NOT EVEN THE OBSCURE FARE!
I am actually a lot more accepting about people being snotty about Classics ™ because I accept that they’ve gone so deep that they probably don’t realize how much they need to decompress – they have lost their adaptations to surface life and normal human interaction, like those deepwater fish that you have to bring up slowly in your net, or they’ll burst. But imagine bringing yourself to be snobby about angsty men’s fiction written between 1800 and 2000.
(Also, Frank Kafka. We shouldn’t laugh)
the day i let go of the Dead White Men School of Worthwhile Fiction was the day i began to truly live as a writer.
i’ve read all of those things Judgy McCriticpants thinks are the only real books. some were brilliant, some were okay, some were disappointing. i’ve also read most of the things on OP’s shelf. same spread of quality. funny thing – being the beloved darling of the establishment doesn’t make you a better or worse writer than the ones who get relegated to the ‘girl stuff’ and ‘kid stuff’ pile. it just makes you more famous.
even that’s not really true anymore. the wheels of academia grind slow, but they grind exceeding fine, and as the literary establishment gradually wakes up to its own shameful obsession with bygone fuckboys, it embraces a wider array of authors and genres every year.
i read all the classics, but i wrote pulp, and i was disappointed in myself. why couldn’t i aspire to The Great American Novel? no one would ever respect me if i kept writing slam-bang action, especially with queers in it! but there came a time when i took a step back and thought, no, you know what, the one i need respect from is myself. i write what i enjoy, and it’s okay to pour all my skill and inspiration into that, because it’s what i goddamn well want to do.
it started as an act of defiance. before long i realized it was actually just common sense. the illusion of Real Literature is only that – an illusion. hype that believes itself.
oh, and for the record, and keeping in mind that i have in fact read every damn one of the books you’re Supposed To Read: the best writing i have ever seen is in fanfiction.
i’m not exaggerating.
on an almost daily basis, i find fanfiction that shames hemingway with its powerful simplicity, or joyce with its experimental creativity, or kerouac with its joyful freedom, or tolkein with its intricate worldbuilding, or – really, name anyone and i could rec you a fanfic that does their thing better. and you know what? most of these writers are women or queer men. the literary world still sees them (us) as alien, but they (we) are no less skilled for all that.
tl;dr: farenheit 451 here can take his snooty nose and shove it up his clenched ass. he doesn’t have the faintest damn clue what he’s talking about.
I have read Fancy Literature, and yes, some of it is fucking amazing. Also some of it is… not really.
There are a whole lot of literary “greats” who were not any better at telling you about the human condition than Terry Pratchett. And yeah, I will absolutely state that Nabokov is a fucking brilliant writer. But you know what? So’s Ursula K. LeGuin. I think her best Russian Novel is in the same class as the best Russian novels by, say, actual Russian novelists. And honestly, some of the “great” writers are mediocre writers who happened to catch a particular thing of interest or importance.
I also want to point out a thing: You can’t understand anything literary in isolation. You really can’t. If you want to understand a thing, you must have experience with other things as well. If reading Harry Potter doesn’t improve your understanding of, and appreciation of, great literature? You don’t understand the great literature yet. And vise versa. If you don’t understand Harry Potter better after reading Nabokov, you don’t really understand Harry Potter or Nabokov.
BUT NO SERIOUSLY CAN WE TALK FOREVER ABOUT HOW SHE STOLE THE ENDING. Because as soon as you get the idea that she’s alive, you think “oh, she’s going to come in at the last second and land a few punches and give Tony – the hero – enough time to get back on his feet and finish the battle, while she cheers from the side lines.” Just. Like. Every. Other. Movie. And then she FINISHES THE BATTLE. SHE KILLS HIM.
One of the (many) reasons I love Iron Man 3: its subversion of the norm on so many levels, including what’s “normally expected” of a movie heroine (and a movie hero…).
i loved this, and i loved how tony did not for even a split second resent her or show any jealousy, or any sense that ‘his’ victory had been ‘stolen’ – he was up shit creek without a paddle, and she rescued the living hell out of him, and he was just in absolute wondering awe.
i am pretty sure the only thing about it they have any conflict over afterwards is how she doesn’t really want to talk about it any more than necessary, because it was a traumatic and upsetting time, but he wants to talk endlessly about how cool she was. he’s like “and then you just FWOOM” and she’s like “tony can we not” and he’s like “sorry babe sorry, ok, i know, i’m stopping. it’s just. FWOOM” and she’s like “tony please.”
yeah.
stark comes across as a narcissistic asshole, but believe me, an actual narcissistic asshole would not have been so happy here.
1) This guy is THE MOST creative storyteller I have EVER SEEN on social media – and that’s not hyperbole, because the thought and care that went into this is so good!
or
2) He finna actually die.
Either way, this is such a good way to spend your lunchbreak. Please go on this journey.
^ That’s a shot from Gone With the Wind. Don’t let anybody tell you it’s not an ode to the Confederacy and the “brave men” who died committing treason.
I watched Gone with the Wind for the first time (all four excruciating hours) because a friend from boarding school is vehemently against the news of the Orpheum Theater’s decision to stop playing the film.
A Memphis theater’s decision to cancel its traditional screenings of “Gone With the Wind” has angered fans of the classic movie.
The Civil War drama, starring Clark Gable as Rhett Butler and Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O’Hara, had been shown at the Orpheum Theatre for more than three decades as part of its classics series.
According to The New York Times, it was last shown on Aug. 11, the same night white nationalists marched in Charlottesville, Va., carrying tiki torches and chanting anti-Semitic and Nazi slogans.
It’s her favorite film (I assume, since one of her daughters is named after the main character) and she made a very impassioned argument over the course of a couple of days explaining why Gone With the Wind deserves to retain its position on a pedestal in the history of film. I’m going to provide that argument in full and respond to all of her points, which I couldn’t do on her page because I was so upset after watching the film, I couldn’t believe people I know were fighting so hard to justify their love for this particular piece of art. If you’ve never seen Gone with the Wind, it starts with the credits and right off the back, please note that these are slaves:
Not servants. The revisionist history comes at you fast. After the credits, we have the set-up for the movie.
This movie is a love letter to the Confederacy set against an overly long and somewhat awkwardly told love story and spectacular costume & set design. It’s also a stunning piece of film-making (the first two-thirds anyway) and a genuine work of art. So where do we draw the line between preserving art and promoting shameful histories?
I was cruising through the net, following the cold trail of one of the periodic “Is or is not Fanfic the Ultimate Literary Evil?” arguments that crop up regularly, and I’m now bursting to make a point that I never see made by fic defenders.
We’re all familiar with the normal defenses of fic: it’s done out of love, it’s training, it’s for fun. Those are all good and valid defenses!
But they miss something. They damn with faint praise. Because the thing is, when you commit this particular Ultimate Literary Evil you’ve now told a story. And stories are powerful. The fact that it wasn’t in an original world or with original characters doesn’t necessarily make it less powerful to any given reader.
I would never have made this argument a few years ago. A few years ago I hadn’t received messages from people who were deeply touched by something I wrote in fanfic. So what if it’s only two or three or four people, and I used someone else’s world and characters? For those two or three or four people, I wrote something fucking important. You cannot tell me that isn’t a valid use of my time and expect me to feel chastened. I don’t buy it. I won’t feel ashamed. I will laugh when you call something that touches other people ‘literary masturbation.’ Apparently you’re not too up on your sex terminology.
Someone could argue that if I’d managed the same thing with original characters in an original world, it could’ve touched more people. They might be right! On the other hand, it might never have been accepted for publication, or found a market if self published, and more importantly I would never have written it because I didn’t realize I could write. The story wouldn’t have happened. Instead, thanks to fanfic being a thing, it did. And for two or three or four people it mattered. When we talk about defending fanfic, can we occasionally talk about that?
I once had an active serviceman who told me that my FF7 and FF8 fic helped get him through the war. That’ll humble you. People have told me my fanfic helped get them through long nights, through grief, through hard times. It was a solace to people who needed solace. And because it was fanfic, it was easier to reach the people who needed it. They knew those people already. That world was dear to them already. They were being comforted by friends, not strangers.
Stories are like swords. Even if you’ve borrowed the sword, even if you didn’t forge it yourself from ore and fire, it’s still your body and your skill that makes use of it. It can still draw blood, it can strike down things that attack you, it can still defend something you hold dear. Don’t get me wrong, a sword you’ve made yourself is powerful. You know it down to its very molecules, are intimate with its heft and its reach. It is part of your own arm. But that can make you hesitate to use it sometimes, if you’re afraid that swinging it too recklessly will notch the blade. Is it strong enough, you think. Will it stand this? I worked so hard to make it. A blade you snatched up because you needed a weapon in your hand is not prey to such fears. You will use it to beat against your foes until it either saves you or it shatters.
But whether you made that sword yourself or picked it up from someone who fell on the field, the fight you fight with it is always yours.
Literary critics who sneer at fanfic are so infuriatingly shortsighted, because they all totally ignore how their precious literature, as in individual stories that are created, disseminated, and protected as commercial products, are a totally modern industrial capitalist thing and honestly not how humans have ever done it before like a couple centuries ago. Plus like, who benefits most from literature? Same dudes who benefit most from capitalism: the people in power, the people with privilege. There’s a reason literary canon is composed of fucking white straight dudes who write about white straight dudes fucking.
Fanfiction is a modern expression of the oral tradition—for the rest of us, by the rest of us, about the rest of us—and I think that’s fucking wonderful and speaks to a need that absolutely isn’t being met by the publishing industry. The need to come together as a close community, I think, and take the characters of our mythology and tell them getting drunk and married and tricked and left behind and sent to war and comforted and found again and learning the lessons that every generation learns over and over. It’s wonderful. I love it. I’m always going to love it.
Stories are fractal by nature. Even when there’s just one version in print, you have it multiplied by every reader’s experience of it in light of who they are, what they like, what they want. And then many people will put themselves in the place of the protagonist, or another character, and spend a lot of time thinking about what they’d do in that character’s place. Or adjusting happenings so they like the results better.
That’s not fic yet, but it is a story.
But the best stories grow. This can happen in the language of capitalism—a remake of a classic movie, a series of books focusing on what happened afterwards or before—or it can happen in the language of humanity. Children playing with sticks as lightsabers, Jedi Princess Leia saving Alderaan by dueling Vader; a father reading his kids The Hobbit as a bedtime story as an interactive, “what would you like to happen next?” way so that the dwarves win the wargs over with doggie biscuits that they had in their pockets and ride to Erebor on giant wolves, people writing and sharing their ideas for deleted outtake scenes from Star Trek and slow-build fierce and tender romance with startling bursts of hot sex between Hawkeye and Agent Coulson.
A story at its most successful is a fully developed fractal, retold a million times and a million ways, with stories based on stories based on stories. Fanfic of fanfic of fanfic. Stories based on headcanons, stories based on prompts, stories that put the Guardians of the Galaxy in a coffee-shop AU and stories where the Transformers are planet-wandering nomads and stories where characters from one story are placed into a world from another. Stories that could be canon, stories that are the farthest thing from canon, stories that are plausible, stories that would never happen, stories that give depth to a character or explore the consequences of one different plot event or rewrite the whole thing from scratch.
This is what stories are supposed to be.
This is what stories are.
Fandom and fan creations are a communal act. They do not disguise how they are influenced by each other. They revel in it.
Literature was once a communal act, too. Film as well. It’s only once we decided to extend and expand the idea of copyright and turn stories into primarily vehicles for profit that we rejected this communal structure. The literary canon shouldn’t be all dead white men. They didn’t build the novel. They didn’t build theater. They took what was already there and said “This is mine now,” and we believed them.
Creativity is communal. There is no such thing as the lone genius on a mountaintop. Ideas are passed around, handed back and forth, growing all the time. Fandom is what human creativity looks like in its normal form. Fandom is like this because humans are like this.
We didn’t just borrow the sword. We remade it because we saw in it the potential for something better. And we did that together, all of us.
also consider: there is no singular story that can be told in even the longest human lifetime that can meet all needs
fanworks fill in those missing stories, those missing needs, in our creative media the way vitamins fill in for a stale and repetitive diet lacking in nutrients
because holy shit are humans complicated
we got lots of complicated needs going on at any one time
sometimes you need fluffy feel-good stories to get you through the day. sometimes you need a good gorey violence-fest to get out that anger and rage and frustration.
sometimes you need to process things too painful for yourself to handle by walking a few hours in someone else’s shoes, feel their pain instead of yours, and reach catharsis that way.
sometimes you don’t even know what you need until you find where someone has written it down, laid it out and examined it from all angles, and put words to it you didn’t even know existed. sometimes you don’t learn you’re broken, wounded, until someone holds up the right mirror.
sometimes you don’t know you can fall apart and just let it out until someone breaks you, ever so gently, and helps guide you back together
we need these stories
we need them like air and shelter and safety and food
they are those things for our minds
we need them, and no amount of restriction is ever gonna be successful at keeping them gone unless we all vanish
Every time you say that you only donate to charities and non-profits with extremely low overhead and administrative costs, what you’re actually saying is that you’ll only support charities and non-profits that underpay their employees and stretch them thin because they don’t have the budget to hire enough of them.
Transparency should be the priority here. Not low administrative costs.
Also? Especially in really BIG catastrophes, in the IMMEDIATE aftermath?
You want the charities that can MOBILIZE FAST. You CANNOT DO THAT if you are pinching every penny and working to the minimal staffing. You just can’t.
Transparency is important. And a charity should be able to EXPLAIN why each of the dollars they spent is spent the way it is, and it should be a solid reason.
And no, this is not just a factor of Money Is Evil. Even if we weren’t in a monetary-reward situation, value of effort, time and training still exists, as does value of goods, and it would simply turn to a different metric.
Considering all the damage done by Harvey and BEING done by Irma and Jose, this seems like a good time to reblog this.
just moving along like everyone else 