fuck jane eyre, where is my dinner
So here's a thing that's tiresome - when people rather gauchely feel the need to point out something that everyone else has been hinting around. There are different levels of this, so if everyone has been hinting very heavily and someone brightly and ironically just smashes it out of the park then it's a fair cop, because everyone ELSE was being heavy-handed - but when you're all very carefully NOT saying the damn thing and they leap in with some earnestness it makes me depressed at humanity.
For example, a post about how Lignin causes vanilla scents when it breaks down, making that delicious Old Book Smell that gets everyone so excited doesn't need anyone butting in with "you wouldn't get that with a Kindle" for a couple of reasons.
1. It will start the tedious eReader enthusiasts off on another defensive rant about how everyone who likes books is an elitist luddite cunt who needs to shut their goddamn whore mouth. Leaaaaaaave the Kindle-users alone. They have their eReaders for whatever reason is relevant to them (weight, accessibility, long journeys, eyesight problems, just liking gadgets a lot) and starting the whole thing off again is just bastard annoying and means I have to use the scroll wheel more to get past the unending squabble over APPROXIMATELY NOTHING.
2. Dude everyone who reads that will be thinking that after a second anyway. It is far more elegant NOT to say it. You can talk about the feel of the binding and the printing ink and the art of bookbinding until the gaping silence where the "you wouldn't get that with an eReader" fills itself in.
The same can be said of all sorts of similar situations, where honestly the elegant thing to do is to talk or write around the thing until everyone's brains individually fill in the blank on their own, and you don't need to carry the can for having said it out loud. I think one of the reasons I find it so gauche and ugly and so on is because it's a trick that you learn, and every time I see people failing to achieve a trick it reminds me of all the times I was stupid and pointless and failed it myself. It's a species of sympathy, albeit one where your chief desire is to get away from the cringe-inducing thing.
Speaking of cringe-inducing things, forcing myself through Jane Eyre in movie form is getting harder and harder as I am increasingly reminded of how much I hated the book as a child and precisely why. Godsfuckitall. I must read The Tenant of Wildfell Hall as everyone says it is infinitely less hateful than Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre and that Anne Bronte was the non-twat one of her sisters. Of course people do also throw a fit about disregarding hatred of romance as a genre because it's so clearly about negating women's literature and hatred of romance fiction is internalised misogyny. The problem I have with this is that there's good romance fiction and then there's shitty wishfulfillment Mary-Sue crap, and Jane Eyre has this horrible tendency to read like the stuff I wrote when I was a kid - only with the added bonus of c It just. Grr. Feisty heroine rewarded with karmically-crippled husband for being feisty but cleverly polite. Woooop wooop. Feminist for its time etc etc etc etc because she wasn't a silent compliant void. Fine, whatever.
HATE.
PS: On the subject of "don't rag on people for writing Mary-Sues" - there is nothing feminist about shitty writing. Shitty writing is shitty writing. You write your wish fulfillment character with flare and a good plot and technical aptitude and I don't care if her name is one letter removed from yours and she does everything you wanted to. But for god's sake don't let your politics blind you to whether or not something is ANY GOOD.
Strongly avoiding actually doing the thing I was going to do today, for some reason, despite my dreams helpfully providing me with a fix patch for some of the narrative in the book; instead I have been making bad puns about Hairy Pitta and looking at pictures of Hiddleston making faces and trying to figure out if I can set my bed on fire in order to prevent me from dying of the cold. Also also I am severely hungry and may actually rise up and eat my boyfriend if this doesn't get fixed soon.
For example, a post about how Lignin causes vanilla scents when it breaks down, making that delicious Old Book Smell that gets everyone so excited doesn't need anyone butting in with "you wouldn't get that with a Kindle" for a couple of reasons.
1. It will start the tedious eReader enthusiasts off on another defensive rant about how everyone who likes books is an elitist luddite cunt who needs to shut their goddamn whore mouth. Leaaaaaaave the Kindle-users alone. They have their eReaders for whatever reason is relevant to them (weight, accessibility, long journeys, eyesight problems, just liking gadgets a lot) and starting the whole thing off again is just bastard annoying and means I have to use the scroll wheel more to get past the unending squabble over APPROXIMATELY NOTHING.
2. Dude everyone who reads that will be thinking that after a second anyway. It is far more elegant NOT to say it. You can talk about the feel of the binding and the printing ink and the art of bookbinding until the gaping silence where the "you wouldn't get that with an eReader" fills itself in.
The same can be said of all sorts of similar situations, where honestly the elegant thing to do is to talk or write around the thing until everyone's brains individually fill in the blank on their own, and you don't need to carry the can for having said it out loud. I think one of the reasons I find it so gauche and ugly and so on is because it's a trick that you learn, and every time I see people failing to achieve a trick it reminds me of all the times I was stupid and pointless and failed it myself. It's a species of sympathy, albeit one where your chief desire is to get away from the cringe-inducing thing.
Speaking of cringe-inducing things, forcing myself through Jane Eyre in movie form is getting harder and harder as I am increasingly reminded of how much I hated the book as a child and precisely why. Godsfuckitall. I must read The Tenant of Wildfell Hall as everyone says it is infinitely less hateful than Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre and that Anne Bronte was the non-twat one of her sisters. Of course people do also throw a fit about disregarding hatred of romance as a genre because it's so clearly about negating women's literature and hatred of romance fiction is internalised misogyny. The problem I have with this is that there's good romance fiction and then there's shitty wishfulfillment Mary-Sue crap, and Jane Eyre has this horrible tendency to read like the stuff I wrote when I was a kid - only with the added bonus of c It just. Grr. Feisty heroine rewarded with karmically-crippled husband for being feisty but cleverly polite. Woooop wooop. Feminist for its time etc etc etc etc because she wasn't a silent compliant void. Fine, whatever.
HATE.
PS: On the subject of "don't rag on people for writing Mary-Sues" - there is nothing feminist about shitty writing. Shitty writing is shitty writing. You write your wish fulfillment character with flare and a good plot and technical aptitude and I don't care if her name is one letter removed from yours and she does everything you wanted to. But for god's sake don't let your politics blind you to whether or not something is ANY GOOD.
Strongly avoiding actually doing the thing I was going to do today, for some reason, despite my dreams helpfully providing me with a fix patch for some of the narrative in the book; instead I have been making bad puns about Hairy Pitta and looking at pictures of Hiddleston making faces and trying to figure out if I can set my bed on fire in order to prevent me from dying of the cold. Also also I am severely hungry and may actually rise up and eat my boyfriend if this doesn't get fixed soon.