Eventful week

[divabeq]

This week we found three orphaned kittens in our garage.  They were cold, but alive and in very bad shape.  None the less, we picked them up, washed them and warmed them up and fed them from tiny little bottles to try to keep them alive, but they didn't make it.  It was all very sad.

One day this week I got a call from my friend, Krista, that

Comments

[cpxbrex]

The author kind of lost me, totally, in a conceptual sense when saying that peasants like to be obfuscated. For instance, the comparisons with Beowulf were disingenuous. Beowulf was written by and for the upper class - it was a story about warriors. Not peasants. Real peasant stories are almost entirely without literary pretense, such as the stories of Robin Hood.

Then, of course, the author said, "I'm not calling you a peasant". Well, fuck you, I like peasants. They worked for a living, unlike the upper literary class you represent.

Additionally, the reason why the New York Times Book Review reviews literary fiction is because it is a review of literary fiction. Maybe fifty years ago that wasn't the case. But in this time and place, the only people who give a damn what NYTBR says are people who read literary fiction. After decades of being ignored by those sorts of people, those of us who actually read genre fiction simply created our own avenues of support in the form of newsletters, fanzines, conventions and nowadays Internet fora, fanfic sites, etc.. The NYTBR - like everything about the NYT - is an anachronism sliding into obscurity, read only an an increasing old, increasingly out-of-touch audience.

The truth is that - if you actually read genre fiction - it is readily apparent that genre fiction is stronger now than it's ever been. Comics, fantasy and sci-fi have busted out into public consciousness in a big way - and having done it without the academy's stamp of approval, quite frankly I don't care if they continue to ignore us . . . as the world continues to ignore them.

[cpxbrex]

Er, Becky, I hope you know that "fuck you" was to the writer of the article, not you, hehe. *smooch*

[divabeq]

Oh, yeah, I *definitely* picked up on the classism in the essay early on, and it is, indeed,a part of my dissatisfaction in the end. That rather than saying "Here are some genre-fiction authors who are better than these guys" he tried to hang onto his *own* brand of pretension by only recommending "classics" that were good. As if the only books that have action and merit at the same time have to be 40 years old or more. That disappointed me. But, there were some entertaining bits in the middle. hehe.